Knowing Better
by i-must-go-first
Summary: All her life she's been told she should know better, but sometimes better isn't best. Memories maybe best forgotten, old acquaintances, and a case Sandra never wanted to see reopened change the way she looks at the past and shape her future.
1. The Innocents

_Author's Note: Well, I just can't seem to stay away ;) Or maybe I should say that Sandra - and Gerry and Brian and Jack - don't seem to want to **go** away. Everyone received my first effort so warmly that I thought I'd try another. This is not the sequel to Same Time, Next Week (although I'm working on that); it's something totally different and definitely darker, although there will be humour. Also, I'm posting something I haven't finished writing, which feels odd to me, but I promise to update regularly. I anticipate having about fifteen chapters, but who knows?_

_Also, I suppose I should go ahead and mention now that this story will involve themes that some of you may find disturbing, but that are really nothing the show hasn't dealt with on some level itself, so I figure they're fair game._

Summary: _All her life she's been told she should've known better, but sometimes better isn't best._ Memories maybe best forgotten, old acquaintances, and a case Sandra never wanted to see reopened blindside the nearly-fearless leader of UCOS, changing the way she looks at the past and shaping her future.

**Knowing Better**

**Chapter One: The Innocents**

"I hate it," Gery mutters, desperately loosening his lavender and pink checked tie and loathing the smoking ban more intensely than ever before, "when there're kids involved. Makes me sick to my stomach."

Brian casts him a half-heartedly enquiring look over the rim of his tumbler filled with orange juice. Jack knows the former D.I. must be wishing for something considerably stronger right about now. "But you were in the paedophile unit."

Jack himself had considered ordering a pint just for form's sake, but had bagged that idea in favour of a large scotch and soda.

"Exactly," Gerry responds dismally. "Worst job I ever had. Wrecked my health and ruined my marriage."

"_That_ ruined your marriage?" Jack asks, but like Brian's, his heart isn't in it.

Gerry shrugs and takes a long pull from his scotch, draining the glass of all but a few lumps of melting ice. "Didn't help."

Sandra stares down into her gin and tonic, her chin propped on her hand and her eyes far away, until Jack prods, "Sandra?" and she flinches like a sleeper waking from a nightmare that she is plummeting down, down –

"Those eyes," she says reflectively. "Those horrible, lustreless eyes – They were like lead or… or coal. I could barely see his pupils while we were questioning him."

Brian blanches. "Obsidian," he suggests, attempting to put his finger on the exact shade.

"Like a fuckin' snake," Gerry snarls with unusual viciousness. "All right, it's a cliché, but he makes you realise why they were invented, doesn't he?"

"Did you hear what he said, his justification for abducting and brutally murdering four little girls, all under the age of six?" Sandra sneers, her jaw locked and her own eyes glittering with outrage. Brian, who sat in on the whole interview with her and knows what's coming, winces in anticipation. "That they should've _known better_. They should've known better than to follow him into the woods to look for his lost puppy."

A long, heavy silence descends. Gerry eventually breaks it. "Christ, how many times do you say to your kids, Don't talk to strangers?" he asks rhetorically, scrubbing his palm over his face. He has pronounced bags under his eyes and looks exhausted. They all do, especially Sandra, who has been putting in sixteen-plus-hour days for the last two weeks, since the remains of the clothes five-year-old Lisa Palmer had been wearing on the sunny autumn day when she'd disappeared had been found in a rusted-out caravan bound for the junk heap.

"You say it," Gerry continues, "but you never think of somethin' like this happening to them. Something like that monster Tanner gettin' hold of them."

"You can't, can you?" Jack surmises. "You could never let 'em out of your sight if you did. It's enough to make me glad Mary and I never had any."

Sandra only shakes her head. She'd like to sleep for a week, if she didn't think she'd be plagued by horrible nightmares of all those precious green-eyed girls staring sightlessly at her from out of the past.

It doesn't matter that Tanner committed his heinous crimes decades ago, or that those innocent little girls would now be in their mid-thirties. Some wounds time shouldn't heal.

They should have _known better_. Hearing the words, Sandra tosses back the remainder of her drink in disgust.

"Pure evil," Jack says suddenly, as if reading her thoughts.

"I'm going home," Brian announces abruptly, getting to his feet.

Jack glances up. "I'll give you a lift."

"No. I could use the ride – Time to clear me head."

The older man acknowledges this but stands too. "I'm off anyway."

Sandra turns to look at them over her shoulder as they pull their jackets on. "You did good work, guys," she says, her fatigue evident in her voice.

As they go, Gerry leans into her across the table. "_You_ did good work, gov. I know you're probably not very hungry – I'm not – but let me take you for a curry." She opens her mouth – to refuse, surely – and Gerry hastily adds, "Look, as bad as I'm feeling right now, I can imagine nothing worse than going home to my empty flat and a six-pack."

Sandra sighs and slumps a little more. She can't deny that the thought is the opposite of appealing to her as well. She envisions herself stopping at the shop nearest her flat, picking up some microwavable meal she won't eat and a midrange bottle of plonk that she certainly will drink. Gerry's company seems preferable to being left with her own.

After a moment she nods and begins to tug on her black and white wool coat. It's the last day of March and they've already had some sun-drenched, pleasant days, but this week winter has roared back in with a vengeance, leaving all of London huddling with frozen fingers clasped around paper coffee cups. By now it's as dark outside their local as if it were bleak midwinter.

D.A.C. Strickland phones Sandra as she is fastening her safety belt in the passenger seat of the Stag, and Gerry says, "Let him wait 'til morning at least," but she answers, looking agonised.

Her end of the conversation is brief, and Gerry watches her expression change from surprise to displeasure to grim resignation. "So what kind of course is it he's sending you on?" he asks when she has finished and dropped her mobile into her lap with a sigh.

She glances over at him before returning her gaze to the road ahead. "Not sending me on a course, exactly; sending me to _do_ a course. A seminar for the trainees in police college."

"On -?"

"What's old and moldy and not a pizza topping?" she retorts. Her voice drops an octave. "'Sandra, notice has been taken of the exemplary results achieved by UCOS with your experienced senior personnel and minimal budget, and the college would like to prepare the future graduates for work on similar initiatives,'" she minces, and Gerry knows she's tired and fed up if she's imitating her boss. That's usually Gerry's bag. "At any rate," she continues in her normal alto, "it's three days starting from Monday, so it'll be a bit of a vacation for you lot not having me round the office. Christ knows you could use one after this."

"So could you," he points out mildly, easing to a stop to wait his turn at a roundabout. "And if I were you I'd insist he gave me one, at least after that course." He casts a quick, speculative look at her sharp profile. "Police college, hey? Don't you think the additional voice, of an older, more experienced –"

"Fatter, balder," she chimes in mercilessly, but at least she cracks a smile.

"—More seasoned colleague could be of immeasurable help to this course?"

She snorts indelicately, and Gerry feels that stubborn twinge of inappropriate attraction that's prone to rear its head at the oddest of times. "Right," Sandra says, oblivious to what's running through his thoughts. "No doubt Caitlin would be over the moon to have her dad show up to impress all her new mates."

Gerry sighs moodily. The dogged determination of his youngest to pursue a career in the Met is a bit of a sticking point.

"It's different now, y'know," Sandra comments in a softer tone after a moment. "It is. The young women coming through now, they don't have to put up with the bullshit we did back in the eighties." She darts a sidewise glance at her companion. She can't resist. "And you know why that is, don't you? Because the rest of your lot have gone the way of the dinosaurs. So you don't have to protect Caitlin from tossers like her dear old dad."

"Cheers, gov," he retorts drily. "Unbearable to work with, am I?"

"Insufferable." Even in the dim light of the car, her teeth flash startlingly in that quick, devilish grin. "Really, though – Do you think they would've had someone like me doing a seminar back then?"

Gerry readjusts his hands on the steering wheel. "You mean someone –"

"Without a dick," Sandra supplies bluntly, and he smirks.

"I was going to say someone with breasts, actually. Because, y'know, there was Joe Craddock –"

Sandra snorts again. "Yeah, cos he weighed three hundred pounds. I think that's a bit different. He still had that all-important Y chromosome. Knew him, did you?"

"I had that misfortune."

"At any rate, every last chauvinistic one of them would've thought you were having a laugh if you'd even suggested having a woman run a course."

She remembers the way dozens of pairs of eyes had flickered over her from head to foot and back again. _I knew your father_, their owners had all said to her. Sandra had only thought she knew what that meant.

"I never even worked closely with another woman until I got moved to AMIP in the mid-nineties," she says aloud.

"And now you're makin' us all pay, yeah?"

"For your sins." Her tone is sharp, but she tilts her head back comfortably against the leather upholstery, settling in like a contented tabby as the heating finally kicks in.

_They must say that to Caitlin too_, she muses idly. _That they knew her father_. It wouldn't mean the same thing when they said it about Gerry – but then, some of them would think it did, which almost amounted to the same thing. He'd been dogged for decades by the reputation of being bent. In her years of working with him, Sandra had come to the conclusion that, ironically, the villains were the only ones who knew for sure that Gerry was straight.

Well, and she and Jack and Brian knew, of course.

Some of Gerry's old mates were still kicking around as instructors at police college. Hers too, for that matter. The thought sparks a query, something she has often half-wondered. "You know, I'm surprised we never met before."

"I hate to break this to you, but you've been seein' me five days a week for eight years. We've met."

"In the job, you pillock," she returns unfazed, because of course he knows exactly what she meant. He doesn't answer right away, which draws her eyes to him as he stares out into the night, waiting for the light to change. She frowns. "We didn't meet," she says, a tinge of doubt creeping in.

"What, you mean to say you think you could've met me and forgotten about it? _Au contraire_, Detective Superintendent." The light changes and he shifts with a little more force than necessary. "You never had the pleasure, no. That's probably a good thing, don't you think?"

Her eyebrows creep upward. "Because -?"

He grins ruefully. "You would've head-hunted me for UCOS if I'd previously tried to sleep with you, would you?"

Sandra quickly blinks twice before coolly pointing out, "I _didn't_ head-hunt you, Gerry. Jack did. I thought you were a bastard."

He shrugs. "Potato, po-tah-to," he offers cheerily. Her remark would only have offended him if she hadn't used the past tense. They may not exactly see eye-to-eye all the time – as in, she may hurl vicious invectives at him, and he may not infrequently want to shake the smugness right out of her – but he's confident that they respect one another down to the ground.

Besides, she's the only one who will share the scorchingly spicy chicken vindaloo with him. An asset not to be undervalued, in Gerry's book.

"And anyway," Sandra resumes abruptly, "if you'd tried it on with me, you wouldn't have lived long enough to make it to UCOS."

"Cos you'd never get involved with a bloke who's got a wife and a few kids," he scoffs, and as soon as the words roll off his tongue Gerry wishes he could haul them back in.

She is silent for a few seconds, her head turned away from him as she looks out at the passing buildings. "Touché."

"Aw, shit, Sandra, I didn't mean –"

Her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. "Let's be fair. I'm not morally superior to you, Gerry; I'm just more discreet."

The polished voice has a jagged edge to it that makes him wince. Her bluntness, with its undercurrent of disgust, wounds Gerry, but not for himself. "All that was a long time ago," he replies calmly.

After a few minutes she clears her throat. "I actually just meant I'd shut down anyone with such terrible taste in ties," she says, and he rewards her with a chuckle.

"What's wrong with my ties?"

"The same thing that's wrong with your politics and this bloody car: they're from the wrong century."

"Admit it: you love this car."

Her eyes roll toward the roof. "Oh, passionately," she agrees glibly. "Such is my abiding love for this car that you're dead lucky I don't know any junk dealers."

"Yeah, yeah, consign us to the rubbish heap. The younger generation has no respect." But his lips twitch, and Sandra is grinning openly.

At least they're not talking any more about those four little girls who never got to grow up.

In the autumn of 1978, Gerry realizes, his Emily would have been the same age as two of those girls. He briefly imagines a world in which he never knew his oldest existed, and the idea is so awful that he closes his eyes for a second, reopening them before Sandra can notice and squawk, "Jesus, Gerry, watch the road!"

"Do we get to choose our next case, then?" Gerry asks when they're settled at a rickety table – this place isn't packing the punters in because of its tasteful décor – with the aforementioned vindaloo steaming between them. He watches Sandra's glossy, manicured nails divide a piece of naan with near-surgical precision before she answers.

"I suppose," she says, glancing at him. "Within reason."

_Just no kids_, Gerry thinks. _I can't handle another one with kids right now_.

It's not a new phenomenon for him, this casting of his daughters and now his grandson in the roles of the juvenile victims he encounters. It doesn't matter that his own girls are all adults. Each time their faces come to him unbidden, and the fact that he expects it doesn't lessen the sickening impact of the horror he feels. It's a hazard of the job, he supposes, like being prone to divorce and alcoholism.

Gerry chews and swallows, taking the opportunity to study the woman across from him because she's too absorbed in the food before her to notice. Her father, of course, had been Old Bill too. Gerry has never seen a picture of Sandra as a child, but he can imagine her, that pert nose and firm, jutting chin in miniature, soft, round cheeks and a face swimming in blue eyes. Was that the face Gordon Pullman had seen when he looked at victimized children?

Maybe. Or maybe he'd been too preoccupied with his own problems. He'd risked his life to protect one of his children, but what of the other, the one efficiently tucking into chicken vindaloo, the one soon to celebrate half a century on this planet?

She looks directly at him, half-smiling, half-quizzical, and Gerry feels ridiculous. Sandra has never been a damsel in distress. She saves herself, repeatedly, and probably in more ways than Gerry has fathomed. He's only on the outside looking in, after all.

Jesus, this case has gotten to him. Gerry shakes his head to clear it and thinks again of his youngest daughter. "Say hi to Caitlin from her old man, will you?" he mutters, and her blonde head nods.

He'd hoped Caitlin would give up the idea of the police by the time she'd finished university, but no such luck. She was every bit as stubborn as her father.

"I should have known better," he says aloud, distracted, and Sandra jerks as if electric current has run through her but casts her eyes down at her plate.

_They should've known better_, Tanner had explained, unconcerned, dismissive.

_You should've known better, Detective Inspector Pullman,_ whispers a second voice, this one from the much less recent past.

The last voice shouts, enraged, never to be forgotten as it vibrates to an undercurrent of near-panic. "Sandra, you _know better_ than to do something foolish and reckless like this. What were you thinking? You're nearly grown up. I have to be able to count on you."

He'd grown almost plaintive as he'd uttered that last sentence. Sandra had never seen her father's eyes so solemn or so urgent, as if he were no longer scolding her but making a pact with her, and she'd felt as self-important as only a 14-year-old can feel at 3 a.m., the darkest hour of a spring morning that promises to dawn rosy and fair.

Some promises are made to be broken.

"Try not to worry so much," Sandra says now with unwonted gentleness. "I'm sure Caitlin can take care of herself."

"So am I," Gerry grouses in return. "She's _my_ daughter, after all."

"Well then?" Sandra prods logically.

"Well then, that's it, innit? She's my _daughter_." Gerry grins, half reproaching himself, half excusing his parental concern, and one corner of Sandra's mouth lifts in a slight smile.

The street is torn up and impassable thanks to some sort of emergency repairs, so she has Gerry drop her a few blocks from her flat. It's black as pitch out, but it's still early, and of course she's perfectly safe.

_I was perfectly safe, Dad. I'm not a baby. I know how to take care of myself._

_You're going to need to know how to take care of yourself in this world_, he'd said. _You could take care of yourself and your mum if you had to, couldn't you, Sandra? _

What he hadn't said was good-bye.

Of course, you couldn't know you were going to have a heart attack in four hours, could you?

But you could damn well know you were planning to top yourself. (Her inner voice suddenly sounds like Jack.)

And Gordon Pullman had done exactly that on that soft April morning, rosy and fair, after making sure that his daughter was asleep in her narrow bed.

Shit. It's ancient history and she doesn't want to think about it, it doesn't do anyone any good, but something has opened up a door – this case, those words, Gerry's concern about his child.

They should all have known better.

It's funny, she thinks humourlessly, that she hasn't really thought about it in these last few years: that final conversation. For so long it had been a cherished memory. Prophetic words from the future, an eye opened from another dimension.

Bollocks.

There was nothing glamorous about asphyxiating yourself in your bloody car. Nothing mystical, nothing hallowed.

_Jesus, Sandra, what does it matter? It was more than thirty-five years ago. You did take care of yourself. You grew up. You did fine. You nick evil bastards who think innocent little girls should "know better."_

Anne Marie hadn't lived so far away from the Pullmans; a twenty-five-, thirty-minute walk at most. Sandra doesn't remember now what the fight was about, which is odd too, because it was in the days before everything in her life was a fight, before she was the mean girl, the school bitch. She _does_ remember that feeling of bursting with the desire to get out of the Thorpes' house into the pre-dawn hours, to separate herself from the other girls spending the night just because she could, because she was mature enough and strong enough and clever enough to by God make up her own mind and trot home along those eerily silent streets.

Her pace slows now, the wooden heels of her patent leather flats clacking slowly, as she remembers. Yes, at fourteen she had found that deep, unusual quiet unnerving, and as a result had forced herself to walk slowly, sauntering as if unhurried. She tries to recapture that feeling, briefly imagining that the years lift their weight from her mind and her body. She is a girl, scared and posturing, jaunty, giddy with the sense that the entire world is before her, unfolding its treasures for her eyes only, reaching out to her.

A gust of wind whips Sandra's hair into her eyes and she blinks. She's not fourteen, nor does she have any desire to be. 49 suits her just fine, at least for the next few weeks.

She vaguely wonders who Bob Strickland pissed off to get her stuck with this seminar. That's really how she wants to spend her weekend, cobbling together notes for a series of lectures. Her own time at police college feels like a thousand years ago, and not in a bad way. Head girl, top recruit, top of her class – and she vastly prefers poking around in the dust with her three boys. Who would ever have thought? She'll never say as much to Jack and Brian and Gerry, but only because she's pretty sure they already know.

Sandra is smiling slightly as she lets herself into her flat and toes her shoes off. The dark, quiet rooms seem much more inviting now that she's slightly buzzed and pleasantly full of Indian food. Gerry does have his moments of inspiration, be it said (just not to him). She gathers her post – junk, junk, bill, junk, another bill – and wanders into the kitchen to fling it all down on the counter, flooded with the mildly enjoyable sensation of flipping her brain onto autopilot and operating according to daily routine. As she does, her eyes fall on her wall calendar, the "Vintage Pin-Ups of 2011" one she got as a joke from guess who?; the one still showing a scantily-clad, cartoonish Miss February coquettishly rolling down her stocking, even though tomorrow is April 1st.

"Can't have that," Sandra murmurs under her breath, reaching to flip the glossy page and allow Miss March her brief moment in the sun. She grabs two by mistake and finds herself eye to eye with the first week of April. Her gaze fastens on the thick black numbers and something in her brain clicks, tumblers gliding into place.

Oh, _shit_. She really has been out to lunch, all her energy focused on the investigation. April 4th. Monday she has to go start her seminar, and it's April 4th.

_Of course it is_, an interior voice jeers at her. _April generally follows March, and the fourth generally follows the third._

The guilt wraps around her like a fist. How could she have forgotten?

But then, perhaps she hadn't, not really. Her father's voice has been there all day, whispering, shouting.

Part of her wishes she hadn't been reminded. She'd like to skip it this year, the visit to the cemetery, the lugubrious lunch with her mother.

She won't, of course.

Sandra flips the light off again and sighs. A nice, quiet weekend organising her notes now sounds like a luxury.

_They should've known better_, Tanner had said.

_You know better_, Gordon had told her.

Sandra is beyond exhausted, maybe a little delirious. She is fourteen again, confronting her father on the threshold of their garden door, half ashamed, half proud of herself. The stone is cold and solid beneath the soles of her trainers. His face is flushed and adult Sandra dispassionately notes that he's been drinking.

"Yeah, well," she says aloud to her kitchen, as if carrying on a conversation with a ghost (and she doesn't believe in ghosts), "you should've known better too, shouldn't you, Dad?"

_Lilies_, she reminds herself, the thought clattering confusingly on the heels of the last one. Grace always used to buy lilies for the grave, and it's her responsibility now. Sandra will ring the florist as soon as the shop opens tomorrow morning.

_More nattering from the author: I'm not entirely sure where this is going, unlike Same Time, Next Week, which I had completely finished before I started posting. Please, please do R&R. Not only is it super encouraging to an attention whore like me, but you might help me decide what to do with this. _


	2. Fathers and Daughters

_Author's note: I know there's not a great deal going on in this chapter, but trust me; I'm just setting the stage at this point. I hope you enjoy, and thanks very much to everyone who commented on the first chapter._

**2. Fathers and Daughters**

She looks out on the ranks of upturned faces and knows she must have gotten old when she wasn't paying attention – some time between shoulder pads and skinny jeans – because all she can think is, _Christ, they're infants_.

She finds herself looking over to where Gerry's youngest daughter sits amidst the ranks of trainees. Caitlin's auburn hair is yanked back into a no-nonsense bun, but the freckle-splashed face still isn't difficult to locate. Sandra has finished her part of the 9 a.m. lecture and is marooned on the stage at the front of the lecture hall with the other three speakers who got roped into this, telling herself not to fidget, not to cross and recross her legs, and not to scratch her nose lest anyone should think she's picking it.

When Sandra's find them, Caitlin Standing's eyes are trained not on the man droning behind the podium but directly on the blonde detective superintendent, and they are studying her thoughtfully, appraising. When Sandra realises this she's somewhat disconcerted, but she likes the way the young woman doesn't avert her gaze, only blinks once and flashes out a quick grin. Sandra smiles back, suppressing the urge to wink. She wishes she were squished between Brian and Jack, who would be imitating the speaker, and Gerry, who would pass the time by cracking lewd jokes.

It's a weird day, which Sandra expected – so maybe that means it's not a weird day after all.

At least she remembered to order the flowers.

She glances at her watch and her mouth tightens fractionally. Not only are the natives getting restless, but Mother Pullman will be growing irritated. Sandra should have left fifteen minutes ago.

As if on cue, her mobile vibrates in her handbag, and Sandra's jaw locks. Strickland's going to owe her big time for this, especially after he promised her she'd be finished in plenty of time to take her mother to what she'd assured him was an important doctor's appointment.

Whose scathingly brilliant idea had it been to schedule the question and answer segment after _all_ the speakers had finished? Every person in this room has been a member of a captive audience now for over three hours. There was always going to be one prat in love with the sound of his, or her, own voice, who rambled for an age and cocked up everyone else's schedule. Sandra cuts her eyes at the director, attempting to send him some sort of karmic or subliminal message.

_Tell Bill Henderson to shut it._

The director doesn't, but fortunately Henderson falls silent of his own volition, like a wind-up toy whose string has finally retracted. As soon as the Q&A begins Caitlin's hand shoots up. "My question is for Detective Superintendent Pullman," the young woman says pertly, something of Gerry in her tone, and Sandra schools her features into an appropriate cast of interrogative solemnity as Caitlin asks about the policies that govern measures taken when interviewing former police officers.

_My policy_, Sandra thinks, _is that I don't take any bullshit from them _or _from the former officers who work for me._ She smiles politely. "It's a bit of a balancing act, really," she begins smoothly.

She is far and away the most popular of the speakers with the students during the next half hour, which gives her ego enough of a boost that she's not feeling as guilt-ridden as she probably should when she jog-trots to the car park. Her mobile has gone twice more during the last thirty minutes. Grace will be turning the corner of querulous and making for the home stretch to livid by now. Not even if Sandra sprouted wings could she be less than obscenely late, and she's usually irritatingly punctual. The idea that she's always late to her mother's because she dreads going is so obvious that she doesn't need to waste time considering it.

She is standing by the open car door, scrolling through her missed calls and realising to her surprise that the first is from a number she doesn't recognise, when she hears the shout: "Sa – Ah, D.S. Pullman!"

Even without the slip of the tongue Sandra would've recognised the voice. Caitlin lightly jogs toward her, but stops a few feet away. "Are you leaving?"

"I'm late already," Sandra responds, but with a smile. "I'll be back tomorrow, though. You're stuck with me until Friday."

"I know," Caitlin replies quickly. "I signed up for your seminars. I was just hoping to talk to you at lunch."

Sandra's smile turns into a grin. "I remember the quality of the food here well enough not to get caught eating it again."

"Emily sent me a whole box full of snacks," Caitlin confides, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "But I suppose I shouldn't have told you that."

"Don't worry, I won't grass you up." Sandra pushes her sunglasses up – wonder of wonders, it's sunny – to anchor her hair and squints slightly. "Your dad sends his love."

Caitlin frowns. "I'll bet he does."

Not particularly eager to get stuck in the midst of the Standing family feud, Sandra merely murmurs, "Of course he does."

"Yeah, but he'd send it a lot more cheerfully if I were doing something nice and feminine like teaching nursery school or popping out babies," Caitlin responds snidely.

"Oh, you know it isn't that," Sandra chides. "He worries, that's all."

"Because I'm his daughter and not his son."

Sandra shakes her head. She's already abysmally late; what will a few more minutes matter? "Because you're his, period, and he still thinks of you as being about six years old. It doesn't mean he doesn't think you're capable of chewing villains up and spitting them out. He's your dad. And he's not quite the dinosaur you think." It's the very word Sandra herself had used just last night to describe Gerry and his ilk, but Caitlin doesn't know that. "After all, Emily's a copper too. And you may not have noticed this, but his guv'nor's a woman."

"Yeah, but Emily didn't really – I mean, Dad didn't have much of a choice about what she decided to do, did he? She sort of arrived pre-packaged."

Sandra bumps the car door closed with her hip and leans against it. "From what I understand, he didn't have much of a choice with you either."

Caitlin's sudden, sunny grin transforms her into that 15-year-old Sandra had first met. "Yeah, but he thought he did, didn't he? – Anyway, it's not my dad I wanted to talk about. But you should go; you're late. If that prat Henderson hadn't rambled on for six ages –" She breaks off suddenly, eyes wide. "Shit! – I mean – Oh, shit. Sorry, sorry, sorry." Caitlin winces. "I apologise, Detective Superintendent. That was completely inappropriate."

Sandra smirks. "It's all right; you've known me for yonks as that pushy woman who orders your father about."

"You've just described all the mums."

"We'll talk tomorrow," Sandra promises. "Come and find me before the seminar, yeah?"

When Caitlin has gone Sandra sinks into the driver's seat and dials her mother. "We've missed our reservation," Grace answers briskly. "Shall I guess? You're working." The slight slurring of her speech caused by the stroke is barely noticeable any more; she has battled hard to overcome it.

Sandra presses her fingertips against her closed eyelids. "My boss sent me to do a seminar at police college, Mum. I'm sorry, but I couldn't very well leave in the middle."

"You still have that nice boss – the handsome one? What's his name, Robert?"

Sandra slumps forward against the steering wheel. "D.A.C. Strickland," she supplies firmly.

"Ah, well." Grace sighs. "I suppose there's no point hoping now. You know what they say about fruit that hangs too long on the vine."

Sandra rolls her eyes in exaggerated dismay but says, "I'm leaving now, Mum. We can have a late lunch –"

"A very late lunch."

"—Or we can go straight to the cemetery and then have an early dinner. I just have to stop off and pick up the flowers."

"Did you get the right kind?"

"Lilies. I got lilies."

"What's the variety?"

"…White?"

A sigh. "Hopeless, aren't you? And nearly fifty years old, so I suppose you'll never learn. Never mind, Sandra."

Thank God: at least Grace is acknowledging that horticultural knowledge isn't a matter of life and death, pun intended. "I'm on my way."

"I said never mind, Sandra."

It's Sandra's turn to sigh. "Mother –"

"No, really. If the ritual isn't important to you, there's no point in dragging you along. I would've thought that for your father – I mean, if it were me I would understand."

Sandra's grip on the mobile tightens dangerously, strangling it. "I know I'm an hour late," she says, striving mightily for calm. Her voice is strained, but that's pretty much how Grace is used to hearing it. "But does it make that much difference, an hour?"

The pause is even longer than she expected it to be. "Yes," Grace says finally. "It does."

Sandra swallows. "Don't do this."

"Sometimes, Sandra," Grace replies to her daughter, "you just have to know when to stop."

It takes Sandra a few seconds to realise the line has gone dead, and then she blinks stupidly at the hunk of plastic in her hand. She has options, she coaches herself. She can ring Grace back, make ineffectual efforts to soothe her mother's feelings until she herself becomes excessively irritated, drive like hell back to the city and cart Grace and the lilies (it sounds like a sixties girl group, she thinks) to the cemetery. She can stand there numbly while Grace places the arrangement, examines the headstone, and murmurs about whether the maintenance staff is taking proper care of the grass, which looks as if it might be struggling, and cemeteries with no grass are _so_ dreary. These are Grace's lines. Then they'll go for a meal, and Sandra will wish she could drink a lot too much while her mother drinks a little too much and launches into some inappropriate topic of conversation, like Sandra's failure to procreate, with an abrupt transition to exactly what Grace wants at her own funeral and how it's all paid for so Sandra will have no need to cut corners to save money.

Sandra and her mother are too alike to enjoy one another's company, especially on an occasion like this one, when they're both ill at ease. It makes them hard-shelled and brittle. What was it Grace had called today? A ritual. Yes, that was it. Rites for the dead, rites for the living.

Or, Sandra thinks, staring blankly at her windshield rather than through it, she could take her mother at her word and not do a damn bit of that.

She has vaguely heard the gravel crunching beneath someone's weight, but still the rap on the window startles her. She jerks and finds herself eye to eye with a very tasteful green tie graced with tiny yellow diamonds. The diamonds stare her down expensively for a couple of seconds before she looks further up.

"You weren't going to leave without saying hello, were you?"

Opening the door so that they can hear one another without shouting, Sandra calmly responds, "I was in a hurry. _Hello_, James."

"That's better." He offers her a slow, lazy smile, and Sandra remembers why she'd once found James Hargreaves so attractive. Now that smile is almost enough to have her turning the key in the ignition and making a beeline to Grace's retirement home.

Almost.

Her former colleague seems like the lesser of two evils as an image of wilted lilies pops unbidden into Sandra's mind, so she says, "It's been a long time."

"Too long." Sandra can't exactly participate in the sentiment, but she doesn't want to be overtly hostile, not today, so she replies with a slight smile. "You said you _were _in a hurry, implying you're not now. Why don't you come back in and have a coffee? It would be good to catch up, Sandra." His heavy-lidded dark eyes always give the impression that he's just waking up. She'd liked that too, Sandra remembers clinically, as if the feelings had belonged to someone else. "Really good," he adds.

"All right, a quick one."

Her heels sink precariously into the gravel as they walk back toward the cluster of buildings, but Sandra has had decades of practice at this. "You look fantastic," Hargreaves says as he holds the door for her.

"The years have been kind to you too, James. The last time we talked was when, '94? '95?"

It was October 1994, as Sandra perfectly well remembers, but if she says as much he'll think she remembers the date so clearly because of him, which she doesn't. D.I. James Hargreaves had definitely not been Sandra's biggest problem at the time. He had barely even made the list. "Oh, hang on – We were both on that course. What was it, ah –"

"Policing Methods in the New Millennium," he supplies, grinning. "Utter rubbish. But even that's been ten years ago."

They'd drunk coffee then too, she recalls. It had been scorched and she had been smugly triumphant, a high-flyer, a star. She'd been awaiting official word on her expected promotion to detective superintendent, and he'd still been a D.I.

They're sitting at the end of one of the long cafeteria tables, surrounded by the comings and goings of trainees and instructors, when Sandra smoothly inquires, "How are your boys? And Rachel?"

Hargreaves is still smiling, but her keen eyes don't miss the tightening of his lips. "The boys are great. Oliver's studying engineering in America; Bradley's engaged to a clever, beautiful girl – medical student. Rachel and I divorced some time ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that," says Sandra, who isn't. Rachel is well rid of him, she thinks.

"Bollocks," he returns, and she can't help grinning. James did have his good points, in all fairness. "You're not married, are you?"

She shudders. "God, no."

"Only to UCOS."

Sandra shrugs. If that was supposed to be a dig, and she's not sure it was, it doesn't faze her. "It is absorbing."

"Tell me about it."

Her eyebrows arch. "You've just listened to me go on about it for an hour. Surely you know all you could ever want to know."

He leans back, all cool nonchalance as he drapes one arm along the back of the chair beside him and fixes Sandra with a meaningful look. She sips her coffee and waits. She can scarcely believe the cafeteria still has these same long, wooden tables, but here they are, battle-scarred but supporting the weight of hundreds of dishes and weary elbows. At first she had dreaded the dinner hours. Next to rising at half five they were her least favourite time of the day. She'd hated standing there with her tray, looking for a place to sit, a group to welcome her, feeling more unsure than she ever had as a girl at school.

She'd been popular, sort of, at university, but she didn't want that sort of popularity in the police.

That, and the food was wretched. Grace had told her it would be a good opportunity for her to lose a few pounds, but then Sandra had acquired mates – suffering breeds comradeship – and they'd cheerfully shared their snacks, their contraband biscuits and cakes and crisps, like children at summer camp.

"You've got Gerry Standing working for you."

It's a statement, not a question, so still Sandra waits.

"One of his is in this class."

Again, this is not exactly new information. Sandra is growing impatient. If she left now, she could get back to the office in a reasonable enough amount of time to find out what the boys have gotten up to in her absence. Yes, combined they have roughly a century's experience at the Met, but they have the disturbing habit of choosing cases for all the wrong reasons, and she doesn't like leaving them to their own devices. Once a type-A control freak, etc.

"Katherine," says Hargreaves, and Sandra briskly corrects, "Caitlin."

"You know her, then."

Sandra's eyes narrow slightly. Certainly James had seen Caitlin chatting with Sandra as he approached. "Of course I do. I've worked with her father for eight years."

"And what do you think?"

Sandra doesn't like the way the wind seems to be blowing. She carefully places her formerly eggshell-coloured cup, discoloured with the residue of thousands of servings of tea and coffee, in its saucer. "Of Caitlin?" Hargreaves only cocks his head. "She's bright, curious, determined. She'll make a good detective."

"You think so, do you?"

"Don't you?"

The D.I. takes a leisurely sip of his coffee – black, but with two sugars – and glances idly around the room before returning his gaze to Sandra. "I must admit I have some doubts."

Her eyes narrow fractionally. Whatever purported "doubts" James has about Caitlin, he's bursting with eagerness to admit them. Wary that she has inadvertently given him a forum, Sandra leans back in her uncomfortable ladder-back chair, determined to offer no encouragement. "I suppose time will tell."

"Not if she doesn't graduate."

Well, shit. She can't just ignore that. She considers for a few seconds before neutrally asking, "Why wouldn't she?"

"Because she's her father's daughter."

Sandra's fingers curl tightly in the safety of her lap. "You might as well go ahead and tell me exactly what you want to say, James, since it's obviously the reason you dragged me back in here. I don't like games."

"That's not what I remember." He pauses, but her icy gaze doesn't so much as flicker, so he continues, "She cheated, Sandra. Or should I say Detective Superintendent Pullman?"

"Whatever you prefer, D.I. Hargreaves."

"She cheated on a written exam in my class. I can hardly ignore that."

Still not rising to the bait, she returns, "So you've reported it, of course."

"That a copy of the exam was stolen from my files, yes. But not who the responsible party is. – Would you like a chocolate?" he asks conversationally as he begins to unwrap one. It's enclosed in shiny gold foil. Chocolates, sugary coffee: the man always did have a sweet tooth. It makes Sandra wonder how the hell the two of them got tangled up together. Well, it's not the only thing that makes her wonder. You're not supposed to still be that terminally stupid when you're in your mid-thirties, are you?

_Wide of the point, Sandra._

"So you don't have proof."

"Call it circumstantial evidence. But given the way Gerry operates – I mean, come on, Sandra. The man's history is hardly a state secret. He's been involved in more shady dealings than you and I've had hot dinners."

"Let me be sure I've got this." Sandra folds her arms and eyes the man across the table. "You got me in here so I'd say that Gerry Standing, a member of _my_ team, is bent, ergo his daughter must be as well?" _As if_, she mentally appends, _she'd need to cheat on your poncy exam anyway_.

He shrugs. "If the shoe fits. You'd know, wouldn't you?"

She wonders how long he's been saving that double entendre, but she isn't about to lose her composure. Sandra retrieves her bag and stands. "Grow up, James. And perhaps you could consider growing a set while you're at it."

As she strides through the corridor she thinks, _Yeah, okay, I could've left that last bit off_. It probably hadn't done Caitlin any favors. She is intensely irritated at herself for letting James trap her into that conversation, especially since she well knows what an asshole he can be.

There's no need to mention this to Gerry and get him all worked up before she speaks to Caitlin tomorrow and finds out just what the hell is actually going on, whether there's anything at all to this. How like Hargreaves to think he's marked the girl's cards, just because of some ancient second-hand rumours about her father. She wonders how many others think the same thing.

There was a time when _she _might have thought the same thing. As Sandra steps again into the April sunlight, the thought shames her, and then she allows herself a grim smile. She'd learned that lesson the hard way – not to judge one member of a family based on what she thought she knew about another.

Sandra is glad to leave those hallways behind. They echo with too many whispers. _Ah, Miss Pullman, yes. I knew your father._

_I know you_, their eyes had said, only she hadn't understood the language. It was probably just as well that no one had warned her. (Who would have? Grace, who hadn't wanted to know what happened at the end of her husband's life, and who would certainly never thank her daughter for having told her?)

Maybe someone should warn Caitlin, though.

It would keep until tomorrow. It would have to.

Again Sandra slides behind the steering wheel. There's no compelling reason for her not to head back to UCOS, only the thought doesn't appeal. Good teams don't have secrets, right?

Her sigh whispers through the quiet interior as she shifts into gear. She might as well go pick up the lilies; they're paid for, after all. And if she doesn't take them to her father's grave, no one else will.

_Please R&R, as it makes me write faster!_


	3. In the Name of the Father

_Author's note: This is a short but necessary chapter, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it. I may be updating rather furiously, as it's a nice distraction from the real world._

**3. In the Name of the Father**

Brian still has three characters available when the office door unceremoniously bursts open and a bird-like brunette hurls herself inside.

"I want to see Detective Superintendent Pullman," she demands, her chocolate eyes unnaturally wide, and from the corridor a voice can be heard shouting, "Oi! You can't just burst in there like that!"

One of the desk sergeants follows the voice into the room. His face is flushed from a combination of exertion and embarrassment. "Sorry," he says sheepishly in the direction of the three men who actually do belong in the UCOS suite. "I told her she couldn't just charge by the desk and come running down here."

"Well, I just have," the uninvited guest retorts, but she is gnawing away at her lower lip and her soft dark eyes have widened even further, if that's possible. She can't be more than 21 or 22, Jack thinks, and she looks like a student in her jeans, billowing layers of tops, and trendily battered trainers. Her short, tousled hair and the metal bar slashing through her right eyebrow seem to emphasize the elfin delicacy of her small, pointed features.

"What d'you want, then?" Brian asks abruptly, his curiosity piqued and the perfect tweet forgotten.

"I told you: I want to talk to Detective Superintendent Pullman." Her jaw juts out defiantly, but she's breathing hard.

"Well, you can't," Jack returns, unruffled.

The young woman's eyes dart suspiciously around the office before coming to rest on the closed door clearly marked S. Pullman. Her eyes glide over Jack and Gerry and she for some reason chooses to address Brian. She ignores the young sergeant altogether, having pegged him as a nonentity. "It's not one of you?"

"No," Brian answers, standing and moving toward her, and he can see the second when she believes him. "She's not here, but maybe one of us can help. What is it you wanted to talk to her about?"

"I need to speak to someone about my father." She glances over at Gerry and Jack before refocusing on Brian. "His name's Raymond Arrington. Maybe you've heard of him."

The defiant arrogance is back in her voice and stance. Gerry cringes at his computer monitor. "We've 'eard of him," he confirms in a monotone.

"We work _unsolved_ cases," Jack says in that clinical manner he can adopt at will. "Your father's case has been closed for fifteen years."

"Yeah, because nobody gave a _shit_ that he's not guilty," she retorts venomously. "Then _or_ now."

_Oh, great_, Gerry thinks. _Another one. No one's dear old mum or dad is ever just a criminal_. Not, in Gerry's opinion, that Ray Arrington is just a criminal; he's an evil bastard. Gerry could use a break from evil bastards.

Brian, though, is thanking the sergeant and shooing him away. "We didn't introduce ourselves," he says once that piece of business has been taken care of. "I'm Brian Lane, and these are my colleagues, Gerry Standing and Jack Halford. Would you care for a cup of tea at all?"

"Uh – all right, then," she stammers, disconcerted, and adds as an afterthought, "I'm Lorelai – Lorelai Arrington."

"And what is it we can do for you, Lorelai?" Brian asks at his most benignly avuncular. Gerry finds it dead disturbing, but Lorelai takes the seat Brian indicates and then accepts the tea and biscuits he hands over a moment later.

"You said you're familiar with my dad's case, Mr. –" Lorelai looks questioningly at Gerry, who doesn't speak, and Brian supplies, "Standing. – Raymond Arrington, born 3rd March 1965 in Leeds; convicted May 1995 of four counts of rape, three counts of murder, and one of GBH. Currently serving a forty-year sentence. He's been refused parole twice, once in 2005 and again last year."

The young woman blinks twice and Gerry relents. "Don't mind him," he says. "He does that."

"Is there new evidence you think needs to be examined?" Jack asks to keep this from going on for the rest of the day.

Those dark eyes flash. "You could say that. I've always known my dad was innocent, and now I can prove it. The real murderer's still out there, and now he's started again."

Lunchtime finds the three men in the pub.

"All I'm saying is, what would it hurt to look into it?" Brian asks, gesturing over his hamburger and chips.

"It could hurt _us,_" Jack replies reasonably, "when Madam finds out you want to go pokin' around in an active investigation. The lads – and lasses – on the third floor are well aware they've got a serial rapist and murderer on their hands."

"Yeah, I hardly think they'd want to share the prize with us," Gerry puts in sarcastically.

"The murder squad has a handle on it." This from Jack. "At least until the next victim turns up."

"But I _don't_ want in on an active investigation," Brian protests, cramming a chip into his mouth. "I want to look at the crimes Raymond Arrington is already banged up for."

"Well, you're halfway there," Jack comments, and pauses to drain the remains of his bitter. "Those cases are old. But you seem to have forgotten that they're not unsolved. This is a bad idea, Brian. Worse, it's a waste of time."

"How do we know that," Brian retorts stubbornly, "unless we blow the dust off and have a look?"

"Mate, I know you want to do a good deed an' all," Gerry says sensibly. "But we can't take this on just because the bloke's daughter says he didn't do it. I mean, how would you feel if your old man was behind bars for rape and murder?"

"I'd be lookin' for any ghost of a chance to clear him so I wouldn't have to carry that around with me all my life," Jack says darkly. "No matter how unlikely."

"Yeah, and that's exactly what Lorelai Arrington's been doing since before she was old enough to buy herself a drink," Gerry reminds. "This is the third time she's come in with a hot tip like this. The reason she came to us is because she's already exhausted everyone else's patience."

"That doesn't automatically mean she's wrong."

"No," Jack concedes in his most temperate tone, "it doesn't. Doesn't make her right, either. Look, we could spend all afternoon arguing about this, but I am actually in charge while Sandra's away, in case you've forgotten that too, and I say this case is a poor use of our time. So let's go back over the road and get some actual work done."

Brian tosses down a note to cover his meal and stands. "It's not our job to dismiss this out of hand," he insists, and stalks away.

Jack looks after him. "What's eating him?"

Gerry leans his elbows on the table and looks from his nearly-empty glass to his friend. After half a minute he speaks. "He's already," he says, "sent for the files."

It's Brian who answers the phone when it rings at half five. "UCOS."

"Oh, Brian, you're still there. Is anyone else about?"

He's still there because he's busy poring over the evidence that the QC presented against Ray Arrington at his trial, but Sandra doesn't need to know that. "Gerry's left for the day, but Jack's just popped out for a snack. Should I have him ring you?"

A pause. "No," Sandra says decidedly. "Cheers, Brian. Thanks anyway."

The detective superintendent thinks for a moment before paging through her contacts and dialing a different number. After five rings she's on the verge of hanging up when a familiar voice answers. "Hello, Sandra."

The familiar voice causes frown lines to appear between Sandra's eyebrows. "I rang Emily, Gerry," she says shortly. "Why are you answering her mobile?"

"I'm playing secretary," he responds facetiously, and Sandra rubs at her forehead. She's hungry enough for her head to throb dully, and she's had too much caffeine.

"Could you just put her on, please." It's not a question.

The gov sounds tired and none too pleased, so Gerry's voice is less boisterous when he answers. "I would if I could. She'll be back in a tick, though, if you want to wait."

"You're down the pub," Sandra surmises, "and she's nipped into the ladies'."

"Ooh, you're a detective."

"I'll wait."

"You may not get much sense out of her," Gerry cautions. "She's had a few."

"It's not even quarter to six," Sandra retorts suspiciously. "What time did you bloody start?"

They'd started at 4:15, but Gerry neatly sidesteps that question. "She's had a rough day," he replies. "Rough weekend, actually, I think."

"Oh." Sandra's sigh rustles against Gerry's ear. "Never mind, then. She can't help me anyway if she's pissed."

"Maybe I can, though," Gerry the Gentleman volunteers. "What do you need, gov?"

"You're not over the limit?"

"Me? Nah." Her silence speaks volumes about her skepticism, so Gerry adds, "I'm keeping Em'ly company, right? I think she needs a shoulder to not-quite-cry on, since she won't tell me what's wrong. I've been nursing the same pint since we got here. Now, you need me to drive somewhere?"

Uncharacteristically she hesitates. "I don't want to take you away from Emily."

"She's had enough anyway – of the booze and of her old man. I'll put her in a cab home." This is the first time Sandra Pullman has ever called Gerry for help, even if it's by accident rather than design, and for some reason it feels important not to miss the opportunity. "She'll be fine."

_This is ridiculous_, Sandra thinks. After all, it was Gerry she'd hoped to reach when she called the office in the first place, not Jack. She'd just thought Emily might still be at her desk upstairs. "You're at our local?" At his affirmative she explains, "I've locked my keys in my car like a proper nonce, but I have an extra set in my desk. Would you mind bringing them to me?"

"No problem at all," Gerry assures, smiling at Emily as she returns to their table.

"I'm a bit out of the way," Sandra cautions in an unusually apologetic tone.

"As long as you ain't in the Highlands, gov," he replies cheerfully, catching Emily's eye as she realizes first that her father is talking on her mobile and second, to whom. "Where am I going?"

Sandra wasn't kidding, Gerry thinks 45 minutes later, when she said she was "a bit out of the way." Of course rush-hour London traffic hasn't helped matters. It has started to spit rain and a stiff wind has kicked up, and Gerry catches himself hoping Sandra has found somewhere warm and dry to wait. He grins. Oh, she wouldn't thank him for his concern. He's still in dad mode.

It takes him a few seconds to realise he's actually reached his destination. Yeah, the odds of Sandra being warm and dry aren't great.

He's at a cemetery.

He drives through the gate and spots Sandra's car readily enough, but no Sandra. It's not dark yet, but with the thick blanket of clouds above, it might as well be. Gerry's eyes sweep over row upon row of grey headstones, luminescent in the twilight, before picking out a blur of colour: an umbrella. As he steps out of the car onto the gravel path his skin meets not rain, really, but a superfine mist, and he flips up the collar of his coat.

He steadily crosses the slightly squishy grass, approaching Sandra, who stands with her back to him, folding up her umbrella. Gerry knows exactly where he is by now, of course, and doesn't know quite what to say. She takes care of that.

"The one day I don't have a raincoat," she grumbles, still not looking at him.

"You can share mine," Gerry suggests with a half-smothered grin, and she shoots back, "Yeah, you're alright."

He steps up to stand next to her and directs his gaze at the headstone. Her father's name is there, along with the dates of his birth and death. 4 April 1975, reads the latter.

"My mother," Sandra says evenly, "and I always bring flowers. Exactly the same kind every year since I was fifteen. Well, except I ordered the wrong ones this time."

"They're pretty," Gerry offers rather lamely, looking down at the riot of colourful daisies.

"No," she corrects. "Mine are still in the car. Someone else left these."

"Your – Tom?"

She finally darts a glance at him from the corner of her eye. "You can say it, Gerry: my brother. They must be from him, but I have no idea how he'd even know the date."

"Where's your mum?"

Sandra shrugs. "She was upset because I was running late. At least that's what she said." She takes one last look at the daisies before turning to face Gerry. "I think she just didn't want to come." She doesn't know if it's the mist or the twilight or the fact that he drove all this way, but something makes her softly confidential. "Neither did I, to tell the truth. I just –"

She breaks off and is quiet for so long that Gerry gently prods, "Sandra?"

She shakes her head. "At some point I stopped doing it for my ad and started doing it for my mum, and I think she was doing it for me. So maybe we don't have to do it at all anymore. I mean, Christ, Gerry, my father died _thirty-six years_ ago. When exactly do you suppose a ritual becomes a routine?"

Gerry tries to imagine his girls visiting his grave for thirty-six years. He loves to be the centre of attention and all, but the idea makes him feel cold. He can't answer Sandra's question, so he lifts a hand to her shoulder, and for once she doesn't flinch away. "Maybe you just have to know. Know when to stop, I mean."

She gives him such an odd, searching look that Gerry thinks he has offended her, but then she asks, "Keys?" and he fishes them out of his pocket and hands them over.

"I'll just get the flowers," she says, "and then can I buy you dinner, or do you have plans?"

"Oh, gov, it's your lucky night," he replies, and she smirks.

"Get out of the rain, old man," she urges as they walk toward their cars. "I'll be right back."

He watches as she efficiently unpacks the floral arrangement and crosses with it to her father's plot. He doesn't get in his car, though. It doesn't quite seem like the chivalrous thing to do with Sandra out in the wind and the damp.

_Right, chivalry. Because that's what Sandra wants from you_.

He does, however, say, "Don't worry about dinner, Sandra. You must be frozen. Go home and change into something dry."

"Ooh, Gerry Standing's urging me to put clothes _on_," she retorts. "I must have finally lost it."

He grins. "Not a chance, gov," he says as he opens the door of the Stag. "I'll take a rain check."

It's her turn to grin. "I assume you mean for dinner?"

Gerry is left almost speechless as she continues, "Thanks a lot, Gerry, really. I owe you one, yeah?"

"You don't owe me anything, Sandra."

She is half in the car when he asks, "Why did you call Emily?"

She lifts her face to him, startled. "I thought she might be working. I called the office first. Brian said you'd left for the day. "

"And Jack?"

She shrugs, and Gerry mentally kicks himself for having asked. Of course she didn't want Jack to come retrieve her from her father's grave. "Have a good time forming young minds," he says hastily. "Keep my girl in line."

Sandra nods and smiles, and Gerry is a few miles down the road, watching her tail lights glow red in front of him, when his mobile goes, and he thinks, _I'm popular tonight._

He's confident that the caller is Sandra, and he answers, "All right, I'll go for dinner with you if you're desperate. Can't resist my charms, can you?"

The pause is just long enough for Gerry to realise his intuition has led him astray yet again. "It hasn't been a problem in the past," Jack deadpans.

"I thought you were – Ah, skip it, mate."

"Brian's here," Jack resumes grimly. "Can you come round to mine before I throttle him? He Has a Theory."

Gerry winces and considers saying he's come down with a plague of boils, but Sandra will not be best pleased if she has to replace two thirds of her team when she gets back from her course. "I'll stop for a Chinese, shall I?" he replies instead. "You want the moo shu pork?"

Jack sighs heavily. "Yeah," he says. "And get me extra pancakes. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those nights."

The sun is no more than a thought on the horizon, but the soles of her running shoes are already slapping steadily against the trail, her heart thumping in time, sweat tickling as it trickles between her breasts. She loves this quiet pre-dawn hour when she can pretend the city is hers. She misses the rolling green countryside and narrow hedged lanes of her native Yorkshire hills, but at least there's this hush before millions of people begin their daily routines, the closest the capital comes to being properly quiet.

She snakes around Wimbledon Park, following the path that will later be choked with dog-walkers and children and frazzled nannies if the day is fine. It's deserted now, and she breathes in the glorious solitude.

She hears nothing, not so much as a footfall on the scattered leaves or the snapping of a twig, before the electric current zings up her spine and through her entire body, at first scorchingly hot and then leaving her tingling unpleasantly. She has somehow lost control of her body, and time seems to slow as she watches the world tilt, almost too bemused to be terrified, as she tumbles to the asphalt. She sees blood appear where her palms have scraped against the ground, but she doesn't feel pain.

A dark shape looms above her, between her and the tree-canopied sky, and speaks to her.

"Jogging all alone this early, Cara – I don't think that's very safe, do you?" The tone is conversational, gently chiding. "In fact, I think you should have known better."

_Please do R&R – I love your comments._


	4. Knowing When to Stop

_Welcome, dear readers, to the fourth chapter, wherein this story becomes a stealth crossover (please don't report me to the fanfic police), I poke fun at one of my other favourite shows, and people talk a lot._

**Chapter Four: Knowing When to Stop**

1.

She spilled scalding hot tea – she'd wanted coffee, but belatedly realised she was out, and didn't want to take the time to stop – down the front of her pale grey silk blouse about three minutes after leaving her flat, but didn't go back to change. No coffee and no wardrobe change made for a grumpy Sandra at best, but she wanted time to talk to Caitlin without interruption before class. Of course the ladies' is out of paper towels, so now she stands inside a stall ineffectually dabbing at the still-damp mess with a handful of toilet roll and feeling about as flat as the mucky colour the spill has stained her top. Perhaps someday she'll learn to stop splurging on the occasional extravagantly expensive item of clothing, because those are always the ones she manages to douse with red wine or curry, not the t-shirts from Primark. She hears the door open forcefully, followed by a few faltering footsteps and what is unmistakably a sob, although the sobber does her best to gulp it down.

Sandra edges cautiously out of the stall, eyes averted, intending to leave the distressed future police-person in solitude. Then her eyes meet those of the young woman staring at her own reflection in the mirror and the detective superintendent freezes. "Caitlin?" she asks, and Gerry's daughter looks at her blankly for a second before saying, "Oh, shit, it's you."

_Good to see you too_, Sandra thinks, but won't say to the tearful twenty-three-year-old. Instead she stands still, waiting for an indication from Caitlin to tell her whether to stay or to go.

Caitlin meets Sandra's gaze in the glass. "I don't know what to do," she admits, furiously dashing away her tears and sucking in a deep breath. "I – I have a problem. Potentially an enormous problem."

Sandra decides to go for humour. "Pregnant?"

"Oh, if only." The young woman snorts. "I'd at least have some idea how to deal with that. But how are you meant to go about proving you _didn't_ do something?"

Sandra steps closer, so that she's standing just over Caitlin's shoulder. "Sometimes you don't," she says bluntly. "But the good news is that if it's something you didn't do, no one else can prove you did, either."

Caitlin smiles bitterly as she turns to face her father's boss. "That might not matter."

"I think," Sandra says carefully, "that you should tell someone who isn't involved exactly what happened."

"Someone like you, for instance?"

Sandra retrieves more toilet roll and hands it over for Caitlin to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. "For instance."

In response Caitlin sighs wearily. "I really didn't want you to know about this."

Sandra's eyes are, for her, soft. "I won't run to your dad with it, you know."

Caitlin studies her intently for several seconds. "You already know, don't you?"

"Come on," Sandra replies, and goose-steps Gerry's youngest daughter down the corridor to the quiet classroom where, in half an hour's time, fifteen students will be regaled with the glories of the old and cold. After closing the door and flipping the lock, Sandra turns to face her first pupil. "The detective superintendent is in."

2.

Jack looks from Brian's empty desk to where Gerry stands at the kettle making coffees for both of them and sighs. "What do you think the odds are?"

Gerry takes out the milk, sniffs it, and curls his lip before responding. "I'm no longer a betting man. Milk's gone off again."

"Splash a little in anyway. It won't kill me – worse luck."

"That's a bit drastic, mate," Gerry comments, following instructions. "Didn't we have some of those biscuits left, the almond ones the guv'nor got?"

"Brian ate them." As Jack accepts his usual mug, both men look over at their absent colleague's idiosyncratically but precisely organised desk. "He's not sick," Jack says mournfully.

"No," Gerry agrees, "Not unless he came down with something nasty between 2 a.m. and eight this morning." Gerry hadn't gotten home and to bed until nearly three, and the four and a half hours of sleep he managed has him bleary-eyed and edgy. "I could've done with a lie-in myself."

Jack tastes his sour coffee and frowns. "If I thought he was tucked up in bed, the berk, I wouldn't be worried."

Gerry knows as much. He and Jack wouldn't be on tenterhooks if they thought Brian was home with the sniffles or a dodgy tummy, but God only knows what he's hared off to do. "He'll never learn when to quit, will he?" Gerry asks rhetorically.

Jack pops abruptly to his feet. "Sod it, I'm going to the house and see if he's there," he announces. The idea of Brian tearing around London at Lorelai Arrington's behest, obsessed with a case Jack has again declared closed in no uncertain terms, doesn't bear thinking about. "You stay here and try to make it look like we're getting some work done. And if Sandra calls –"

"Yeah, yeah." Disgruntled, Gerry waves the deputy away. "I don't know nuffink."

3.

After waiting several minutes, Brian presses the buzzer again, and this time the intercom clicks to life. "What do you want?" asks a voice that is not exactly hostile, just no-nonsense.

"My name is Brian Lane," he begins. "I'm with UCOS, the Unsolved –"

The tone of a buzzer interrupts him as the building's front door is remotely unlocked. "I suspected you lot would come calling eventually. – First floor, Memory Lane. Put the kettle on, shall I?"

He doesn't know what he'll find at the top of the stairs. The woman who'd been the Met's first female detective superintendent had a reputation for a brilliant mind, a dogged will, and a spine of steel. Those qualities explained why she'd been head of the murder squad for eight years.

And that, in turn, probably explained the less glorious aspect of her reputation: as an out-of-control alcoholic who'd cocked up more than one investigation and been dragged, virtually kicking and screaming, out to pasture. It was a sad story but not, Brian thought with a certain amount of grim amusement, exactly unusual.

"Brian Lane," she greets him now, hazel eyes cool, lips quirked at some private joke. "I won't offer you a drink, since we don't, do we?" Score one, Brian thinks. She knows her reputation precedes her, and wants him to know that his precedes him as well. "Tea?" she suggests. "Apple juice? Or would you just like to cut the bullshit and tell me what it is you think I can do for you?"

Brian chooses what's behind door number three. "Raymond Arrington," he says simply as she gestures for him to go into the lounge. In response she emits a low whistle.

"Raymond Arrington," she repeats as she settles herself into an overstuffed armchair. There is an intimidatingly thick novel lying face-down on the end table. Turgenev, Brian notes. A little light reading. "Out of all the cases I worked in all those years, I never thought Ray Arrington – Although I'm not as surprised as I would've been six weeks ago."

"So you think the three recent murders –"

Her eyes bore into his. "Four," she corrects evenly. "You haven't seen the news today. Cara Lehigh, thirty-six. Yorkshire-born. Single, no children, no family nearby. Very successful IT guru, apparently. She was found at 6:15 this morning, raped and murdered in Wimbledon Park. Like the others, she'd been tased, but would have been alert during the attack. Again, like the others, her throat was cut."

"And how do you know all this?"

Her eyebrows creep toward her hairline. "How do _you_ know what goes on in this town? I'm retired, Brian, not dead. I ran the murder squad for the best part of a decade."

Brian smiles slightly as he uses the hem of his jumper to rub at a smudge on his glasses. "Of course," he agrees. "So you thought of Arrington right away?"

She shrugs and reaches up to tuck a strand of silver hair behind her ear. "Of course I did. The similarities are striking." Her chin comes to rest on her fist. "All the victims are in their mid- to late thirties; all successful professionals; all of similar heights and weights. The attacks have taken place in several different boroughs, but all in parks, and all very early in the morning or late at night. These victims are not chosen randomly; he stalks them, learns their routine. – You must know what's on the list. Sure, it's Arrington's M.O. But I don't entirely understand what brings you here."

Brian frowns. "You were in charge of the investigation that led to Ray Arrington's arrest and conviction."

"Of course I was." Her gaze drifts to a framed photograph hanging on the wall to her left. It captures a hauntingly thin young woman with a strangle-hold on a sub-machine gun. "Because of the geographical distribution of the victims, it got thrown over to AMIP, and I was AMIP. But Sandra Pullman's your governor. She could answer all these questions as well as I can."

Brian regards her steadily. "Sandra was on your team, but she wasn't in on Arrington's arrest or his questioning."

"No," she agrees, but with a smirk. "She wasn't one of the arresting officers, and she wasn't called to testify at the trial. However, she could certainly tell you all about the investigation itself. But then she'd have to know you're looking into this, wouldn't she?" The smirk turns into a rather evil grin, not so different from the one Sandra reserves for special occasions. "She won't thank you for trying to go around her."

"Detective Superintendent –"

"You can dispense with that. I'm out to grass, after all. Jane will do."

"Jane, do you still think your team got the right man back in '94?"

"Oh, yes," she responds immediately.

"He never confessed."

"He didn't have to. – Talk to Richard Haskins; he's still in the job. Talk to Sandra. And certainly talk to Melanie Tyler; her name must be all over your files. She'll lay any doubts you may have about Raymond Arrington's guilt to rest." She chuckles to herself with very little humour. "AMIP – That seems like a hundred years ago. I had a good team. Well," she says abruptly, her tone turning brusque, "I never could figure out to quit while I was ahead."

Brian has the distinct feeling that the conversation is over. Jane follows him to the door. "It's not just the recent murders, is it?"

He looks back at her keen light eyes. A drinker she may be, but she hasn't been drinking today. "No," he admits. "His daughter."

Jane thinks for a few seconds. "She must be what, twenty? Twenty-one? Well." That simple syllable carries a world of meaning. "Give my regards to Sandra. Oh, and to Gerry Standing, of course."

4.

"Gerry Standing, of course" had been standing in the middle of the UCOS office, gaping in outraged dismay at the twelve boxes of evidence that had just been delivered by a disheveled and none-too-gracious P.C., when his mobile burred in his jacket pocket. He expected it to be Jack, of whom he had seen and heard nothing in four hours, and hoped it wasn't Sandra. What would he tell her – that Jack and Brian were out on inquiries into the case they weren't investigating?

The next time he saw Brian, he'd be tempted to punch him in the face again.

"Gerry?" a not-immediately-familiar voice asked. "This is Lee Anne."

Ah, yes, the lovely Lee Anne: Scottish, red hair, heart-shaped face. Forty-five-ish, very tight jeans, great arse. They'd bonded over the wonders of fish sauce, of which he had kindly let her have the last bottle, in his local Tesco last week. They'd made a dinner date for –

"I just rang to see if I should bring anything at all tonight."

For the first time in his entire adult life, Gerry had forgotten a date with an attractive woman. He was definitely going to punch Brian in the face.

Fortunately he's an expert, a master, an artiste, and now he is putting the finishing touches on the Thai chicken with basil. The salad is waiting to be dressed, the wine is breathing, and Lee Anne won't arrive for – he checks his watch – another fifteen minutes.

(The doorbell rings.)

… Unless she's early.

He answers the door with his most charming smile in place. It vanishes the instant he registers the fact that the eyes he's looking into are stern and blue rather than melting chocolate. "Oh, it's you. What are you doing here?"

Sandra's non-expression instantly transforms into a glare. "What am I today, Typhoid Mary?" she snaps, brushing past him into the flat and dropping her handbag onto a chair.

"Don't get comfortable," Gerry cautions. "I have plans."

She purses her lips. "And you think I'm here for fun, is that it? Dropped by to shoot the shit?"

"I reckon you missed me," he tosses back with an edge.

"Right, it's been almost twenty-four hours since I last saw you," she volleys. "And that just wasn't enough Gerry to tide me over."

"I often have that effect," he replies complacently. "Some women find me addictive."

"No, Gerry, just a dick." Sandra's lips quirk at her own quip. "I want to talk to you."

"Er, can't it wait?"

Her hands come to rest on her hips. "Yeah, that's why I'm here now, 'cos it can wait."

Gerry sighs. "Come in the kitchen, then. My chicken's burning."

"Hot date?"

"Yes, actually," he replies, installing Sandra in a corner where she can't do much damage. "Don't touch anything."

She shoots him a scathing look. "If you put as much effort into your job as you do your pulling, I reckon our solve rate would be a hundred percent."

As Gerry has been the only UCOS member doing actual work today, the statement rubs him the wrong way. "There's more to life than work. I know you haven't experienced that personally, but you can take my word for it. Some of us know when to stop. It's called 'having a life.'" His hostility has more to do with Brian than with Sandra, but Brian isn't here, and Sandra is.

"It's hard to stop if you never start in the first place," she tosses back. "No wonder you let everyone think you're bent, Gerry: it's a hell of a lot more creative than just being lazy."

He scowls at her over the salad dressing he's mixing. "That's a bit out of order, don't you think?"

"You're a sod, Gerry. You spend three quarters of your time chasing any woman you think might spread her legs for you, and then you resent everyone who works for a living and gets promoted above you," she replies through clenched teeth. She's not so sure she's talking about Gerry any more, but she's had a hell of a day, and he's apparently decided to be the cherry on her shit sundae. She came over here because she's spent her day trying to help his daughter, which has involved much more time in the presence of James Hargreaves than he would have preferred, and all Gerry has done is insult her because she's interfering with his plans for a shag. "Maybe if you spent a little more time thinking with your brain and less with your –"

The doorbell rings. Sandra and Gerry glare at one another in silence before he moves. "Take my advice, sweetheart," he says. "Get yourself a date – do you a world of good."

Sandra is turning a mottled crimson as he goes to answer the door. All right, he shouldn't have said that – he really shouldn't have said that – but he's sick of her using him as her whipping boy. None of this is his fault. Brian is the one who's refusing to follow orders, instead tearing off on a wild goose chase; and Jack is, as he's so fond of pointing out, the one who's supposed to be in charge. Why not flay one of them for a change? The injustice of it all makes his blood boil.

And she's ruining his bloody date before it's even started. How is Lee Anne going to react when she finds a livid Sandra in Gerry's kitchen? If the guv'nor has _touched_ the spring rolls, he'll kill her. (Gerry is having a disturbing number of violent fantasies tonight.)

He greets Lee Anne warmly but distractedly – he's had enough practice that she doesn't seem to notice – takes her spring jacket, compliments her wardrobe choice (chocolate-coloured skirt, knee-high boots, silky blue sweater: very promising), pours her a glass of wine and excuses himself to "finish dealing with something. Then," he assures her, "I'm all yours."

"Something" is standing in the kitchen with her arms folded and an expression that could make paint peel.

"Let me guess," she grits out. "Forty-five. Petite. Estate agent. One – no, two kids. Drinks chardonnay and wouldn't miss an episode of Corrie."

Gerry balks at the trite stereotype of the women he dates, even if she's not far off. "I think you're confusing her with _your_ last date," he retorts. "Isn't that what you look for in a man, someone you can steamroll without too much effort? Or can you remember that far back?"

"Too bloody typical," she snorts. "I'd rather stay home every night until I'm eighty than go out with a Neanderthal who shares your views on women. Men like you are a penny a pound: so intimidated by any woman who might actually challenge you that you try to hide behind your pathetic macho posturing." She sweeps past him into the corridor, then peeks into the living room. The attractive redhead on the sofa blinks at her in surprise.

"Don't mind me," Sandra says wryly. "I'm just leaving." She looks at Gerry, who's a step behind her. "And you say _I_ don't know when to quit."

"What did you want to talk to me about?" he practically growls, stalking her to the door.

"Never mind. I decided it could wait," Sandra replies grandly. She hoists her bag over her shoulder. "You obviously have more important things to focus on right now."

After Sandra has flounced out in a huff of righteous indignation, Gerry returns to the lounge, where Lee Anne is perched on the edge of the sofa, warily sipping the wine (which is not chardonnay). "I'm really sorry about that," he apologises, pouring himself a glass. "She can be – difficult."

Her smile is soft, like the rest of her: soft, warm, gentle, welcoming. The anti-Sandra. Sandra would probably consider Lee Anne a nice pre-dinner snack. Just looking at her (she's a bank clerk, not an estate agent), Gerry feels a soothing wave of calm roll through him. "It's all right," she says. Her accent, like everything else about her, is beguiling.

Gerry sits next to her, close enough but not crowding her. Maybe this one. It's a thought that doesn't exactly come from his brain, more from the molecules under his skin and the breath in his lungs. Sandra may say he doesn't know when to stop, like he's some aging Casanova wannabe, but he knows exactly when: when he finds the right woman. Until then he'll keep looking.

Lee Anne's scent is subtly sweet. Maybe this one. He smiles. Despite this day, despite Sandra, despite everything, he has a good feeling about tonight.

"Don't worry about it," she adds, and Gerry can't help comparing her to his demanding, inflexible governor. So many of life's problems could be solved with a smile and a glass of wine.

"I really appreciate that," he says, sliding a bit closer. "There aren't many women who would be as understanding."

"Maybe it's because I've been there, Gerry," she says, all sympathy, and he thinks_, Really? You've had your boss show up at your flat for no good reason, highjack your date, and railroad you for something you haven't done?_

"She seems passionate," his date continues, and Gerry wonders why they're still talking about Sandra.

"Completely bloody-minded, more like," he grumbles. "But that's enough about Sandra. I'm much more interested in talking about you."

Lee Anne lays her hand on Gerry's arm and he perks up. _Now we're getting somewhere_. "Maybe we should talk about – Sandra? – though," she says feelingly. "Trust me, Gerry: those feelings don't go away just because you ignore them."

He opens his mouth to reassure her that he and the gov argue periodically, and yeah, they were both out of line tonight, but he'll apologise and she won't, but she'll find little ways to be nice to him, and everything will be peachy keen at UCOS. Before he can, though, Lee Anne throws cold water all over his warm fuzzies.

"There's no rule book, is there, to tell us how to deal with our exes? But maybe there should be. Divorce is hard."

Gerry feels his eyes widen. "Oh, no – I'm divorced, but not – Sandra isn't – We've never –"

"I know," Lee Anne sighs, patting his arm in a disturbingly sisterly fashion. "Oh, Gerry, I can't tell you what a relief it is to meet someone in the same situation so I don't have to spend yet another nice putting on a brave face. It's exhausting, isn't it?"

"The same situation," Gerry repeats blankly.

Lee Anne nods, and her eyes shimmer with a fine mist of tears. "Just because you fight, because you sign your name to a piece of paper – It doesn't mean you're not still in love, does it?"

5.

Likewise, Sandra's plans for a nice quiet evening in are being thwarted. Despite her extreme irritation with Gerry and with men in general, things started out promisingly enough. She got home from her aborted mission of mercy, changed into her oldest track suit, and set herself up on the sofa with the remains of last night's take-away, a bottle of merlot, and the Sky Plus remote.

And then the doorbell rang.

She swears under her breath. Maybe, she thinks, it's the Jehovah's Witnesses. She can get rid of them easily enough and still be parked in front of the telly in plenty of time to jeer at Peter Boyd's antics and fantasize about what UCOS could do with the CCU's evidently unlimited budget. (If she were Boyd, the first think she'd do would be to buy some proper lights for that office, but, saints be praised, she isn't Boyd, and her team members don't have the annoying habit of dying or vanishing at the end of a series.)

It's not the Jehovah's Witnesses, unless Emily has converted.

"I'm really sorry to show up like this," the detective sergeant says gloomily, "but I didn't know where else to go."

_Are you still with me? Let me know! _


	5. Reputations

_Author's note: Gentle readers, behold chapter five, wherein yours truly is unable to keep her natural verbosity from taking the reins, the stealth crossover becomes less stealthy, everyone eats soup, and Sandra watches the news. _

**5. Reputations**

A generous shaft of rare early-evening sunlight catches the shifting golds of Sandra's hair – the colourist did a particularly good job this month – and the dust motes dancing in the still air of her bedroom, and she stops, briefly arrested by her own reflection. She isn't vain, but she thinks hers is a nice enough face – wide eyes, bone structure that means serious business; while she isn't really what you'd call tall, she long ago learned to use the height she possesses to her advantage; and she can work a pair of skinny jeans in a way that would make many a younger woman weep, if she does say so herself. No, Sandra doesn't have any particular complaints about the way she looks.

But it's not the way she looks that the detective superintendent is attempting to see. What interests her in her quiet, introspective mood is what other people see when they look at her, and that has only so much to do with how her hair is cut or whether she's gained five pounds or if she had time for eyeliner that morning. It's something much less visible to the naked eye and much harder for her to see as she looks into the blue eyes that have looked back at her for forty-nine years, ten months, and twenty-seven days, give or take a few hours.

Sandra has photographs stuck in frames, shoved in drawers, absently or carefully pressed between the pages of books. Assembled chronologically they suggest a narrative of her life that's as good (as adequate and inadequate) as any other. They depict a spectrum of Sandras. At age six, missing a front tooth, long hair meticulously braided, sunny smile. Age nine: messy ponytail, beloved riding boots, frowning slightly at the second-place ribbon from the most recent horse show, convinced the judges have made a mathematical error. Thirteen and awkward, frizzy hair everywhere, shiny clean skin, vaguely humiliated by the cosmetics the other girls in her form wear with what seems to be such adult sophistication. Fifteen: hostile and insecure, arms folded, lofty and contemptuous, wanting to smile, wanting to kick someone. (The school had sent home politely, almost apologetically, worded letters that she'd made sure Grace never received. While Sandra was at the head of her class academically, they said, she was "a bit of a discipline problem." That was the headmistress's way of saying, "We know your husband died recently, but your daughter needs a thrashing like the ones she gives out to the other girls.")

Then at nineteen, studious, hair tamed at last, having figured out that you can become "one of the guys" if you sleep with them occasionally and have no interest in hearts and flowers, but unsure of how she feels about this bit of knowledge. At twenty-five, confident in her uniform, less concerned about being liked than about being successful, following in her father's footsteps. (The hair colour and blue eyes she gets from her mother; notwithstanding, she looks enough like her father that she is recognised by serving officers who've never met her or known she existed. "You must be Gordon's girl," they say to her, avuncular and a little condescending.)

Next come the Bridesmaid Years, wedding after wedding chronicling her increasing boredom until she emerges triumphant and polished and grinning that old grin. This is when Jack and the rest of the murder squad took her out to celebrate her promotion to D.I. She is well on her way to wherever it is she's going.

In the last one, the one that's framed and hanging unobtrusively in the hallway, she grins again, surrounded by her Three Stooges. It's Brian's most recent birthday, but Sandra is somehow the centre of the group. Brian himself and Gerry flank her, Brian leaving plenty of room for the Holy Ghost, Gerry being Gerry, his arm not slung over her shoulders like their colleague's but wrapped firmly around her waist. Jack peeks between Sandra and Gerry, toasting the camera with his bottle of beer, and they're all laughing. She's one of the guys at last, and she didn't even have to sleep with any of them. (The thought makes her snort with derisive laughter.)

Shaking her head as if to clear it, she turns away from the mirror, strips off her black and white pin-striped blazer and steps out of her heels. The floor is nice and cool beneath the soles of her bare feet.

They are a quirky lot, her three, none of them as easy to classify and file away as they might seem on the surface.

And what of their guv'nor?

She's been listening to the whispered comments in the hallways and cafeteria these last few days at the training college, and what the students say about Detective Superintendent Pullman doesn't bother her. She revels in it, actually. A ball-breaker, relentless, obsessive – even a bit of a tight-ass, she'll take. She doesn't mind shouldering the mantle of that reputation when she pockets her warrant card, smoothes the razor-cut ends of her hair, and strides out into the London streets. Sandra can't help but be reminded of what she'd heard about her first female boss before she'd actually met the woman; it was virtually the same, word for word. Maybe that was still a part of being a woman at the Met, nearly twenty years on; or maybe it was just that the women who made it, really made it, knew they had to work ten times harder than anyone else.

("I heard she screwed her way up the ladder," Hargreaves had said of Jane the first morning Sandra had met either of them, and Sandra had cut him dead with a look. "I didn't say I believed it," he'd added guilelessly, but honestly, that should've been her first clue. Some detective she'd been then.)

She hears the door open as she is pulling a black cardigan over her tank top, and Emily tentatively calls, "Sandra?"

"I'm here," she calls back, thinking about the woman who had shredded her ego, kicked her arse six ways from Sunday, and generally mentored her after Jack's retirement. Jane was brilliant and completely relentless, and when Sandra thinks of her she always first remembers one night when the two of them were alone in the squad room, working into the wee hours on a particularly grueling series of rape-homicides that had occupied their AMIP area for several months. They'd both been squinting under the bars of fluorescent lights and drinking stale coffee when Sandra became aware that Tennison had gone completely still, and looked up to find the older blonde scrutinizing her.

"This would never have happened ten years ago," Jane had commented reflectively. "Hell, not five years ago. Two women working a high-priority, sensitive job like this one." Sandra had smiled slightly, distracted, and her superior had continued, "You remind me of someone I used to know, Detective Inspector."

Sandra had met her eyes briefly. "Ah?"

"Me." Tennison smiled that mysterious smile that was indicated only by a quirk at one corner of her mouth. "A word of unsolicited advice, Sandra: You've done enough tonight. Go home and get some sleep."

She'd frowned. "But I still –"

Tennison had crossed the room, removed the pencil Sandra was clutching from her grasp, and dropped it on the scarred metal surface of her desk. "You have a brilliant career ahead of you. Learn when to stop."

Sandra had heard the edge of hostility in her own voice when she responded – Tennison hated to delegate. "What does that mean, then?"

Another quirk of the lips. "It means go home, D.I. Pullman."

She had gone home that night, but there had been plenty of others when she hadn't. That was just part of it, wasn't it? You couldn't be a proper cop and work nine to five.

Sandra smiles to herself as she wanders into the living room. Tennison certainly hadn't been telling her to settle down with some nice fellow, have babies, and devote herself to carting the kids to football practice.

The smile disappears as she contemplates the end of Tennison's long tenure at the Met. Maybe there is such a thing as equilibrium, a happy medium; and maybe Gerry was right last night: Sandra doesn't know when to quit.

"Emily," she calls, "How about a glass of wine?"

The younger woman stops in the act of pouring herself a glass of water. "That sounds much nicer," she agrees. "I feel like this is such a huge imposition. I could've gone to a hotel. I should've gone to a hotel."

"No, you shouldn't," Sandra replies, uncorking a bottle.

"It's only for a few nights, just until Michael gets all his things out of the flat. The thought of having to be there for that – Meh." She accepts the glass Sandra hands her over the counter and smiles ruefully. "Of course, he says the problem is I'm never home anyway. But it's not as if I used to be a bank clerk, is it, and then suddenly took up with the police? He knew it wasn't a nine to five."

Sandra looks sharply at the younger woman as her own thoughts are echoed back at her.

"I spend enough time with everyone at work, and I'm not really good at keeping up with my friends from uni. Then Paula has Gerry and Amelia lives in a bed-sit," Emily continues, reverting to her earlier train of thought. "I could've gone to Gerry's, but I'm putting off telling him. He never really said, but I know he was fond of Michael."

"He's fonder of you," Sandra returns, slicing a sliver of brie and depositing it on a cracker.

"Oh, I know. And I know he likes showing his copper daughter off to his old cronies, too. But he was really pleased when Michael moved in. I know it's not as if he thinks I need to be married or anything like that, but he was always worried before about me being alone, like it's life's great tragedy."

"This is Gerry Standing we're talking about," Sandra points out drily. "His relationship philosophy is that not only should you never be alone, but you should always have an understudy waiting in the wings just in case the leading lady can't go on."

Emily shrugs as she accepts the cheese knife and goes about cutting off a wedge for herself. "At least he's an optimist. Three failed marriages and still looking for love."

"In all the wrong places." Emily grins but doesn't reply. "I talked to Caitlin today," Sandra continues. "She said you're doing the mentorship program with her." Assuming, of course, that James Hargreaves doesn't halt Caitlin's career before it ever gets started; but Emily has enough problems at the moment without worrying about her sister, and besides, after her chat with Caitlin before Tuesday's seminar, Sandra is confident she and the youngest Standing can sort the D.I. out themselves. Gerry may not even need to be told.

Emily smirks down at her cheese and crackers. "In a manner of speaking." At Sandra's raised eyebrows she explains, "It's one degree of separation."

Sandra sips her wine. "From -?"

"You. She'd ask you if you weren't too high-ranking," the D.S. explains simply.

"Hah! Well, I wouldn't mention that to your father, if I were you," Sandra cautions, and then wishes she hadn't when Emily sends her a skeptical look. "It's just that he's suggested more than once that I see the Met through rose-coloured glasses."

"Wine glasses?" Emily cuts in. "Shot glasses?"

"I've already warped one of his daughters. I might produce a race of spinster workaholic automatons."

"Oh, highly likely." Emily snickers and looks more cheerful than she has at any time in the last twenty-four hours. "That's obviously what Gerry thinks of you."

"It's not all he thinks," Sandra concedes cheerfully enough. "He knows I could bloody well break him in half if I had occasion to. Fancy a curry?"

They have both given up all pretenses of doing work and are sprawled in front of _EastEnders_ when the buzzer sounds. Sandra hops lightly to her feet and while Emily is insisting that she'll pay, Sandra is delightedly slipping the chain and opening the door.

"Delivery," says the man half-concealed behind a large bag of what is obviously hot food, and Sandra's forehead creases.

"Moonlighting, Gerry? Been gambling again?"

"Nah, I missed your sunny disposition, didn't I?" He offers that crooked, self-deprecating half-smile of his over the top of the bag, and she can't help returning it even as she says, "That's not what I ordered."

"This is ten times better than whatever you ordered, gov."

"What is it?" she asks, momentarily distracted by the intriguing prospect as she peers into the bag, but she can see only a grouping of plastic containers.

"Er, Thai chicken with basil, spring rolls, papaya salad – oh, and coconut soup with shrimp."

Sandra's eyes roll toward the ceiling. "Oh, you charmer. You've brought me your sodding leftovers?"

"Oi, don't sully this fine meal with that appellation. Besides, none of it got eaten last night." Her scrunch-nosed expression reflects pure disgust, and he hastily clarifies, "No, unfortunately, not what you're thinkin'. As it turns out, you were right."

"Leah's not the woman of your dreams, huh?"

"Lee Anne, but no. She needed a shoulder to cry on. That's all I'm good for these days, apparently." He gestures with the bag. "Look, I know I was well out of order last night. Brian and Jack did my head in yesterday and I took it out on you. Peace offering?"

She smiles that free, easy smile that he used to see more often and says the last thing Gerry expects. "I'm sorry too. I was thoroughly pissed off, but not, for once, at you." And yet she doesn't show any sign of moving to allow him into the flat.

"You don't suppose I could come in?" he asks with a trace of humour.

"Ah –" Sandra glances over her shoulder.

"I don't give a toss about your housekeeping," he assures her.

"No, that's – There's someone here."

That's twice in twenty-four hours that an attractive woman has doused his evening plans with decidedly cold water. He's never going to be able to unload this sodding dinner, Gerry thinks, and reassures himself that that's the only reason he instantly feels so glum.

"You work fast," he says, forcing a smile as he presses the bag into Sandra's arms so that she has no choice but to take it or risk being bathed in tom yum. "Not that I'm not delighted to see you takin' me expert advice. There's plenty in there for two. We'll see you back at the office tomorrow, yeah?"

"Gerry, wait," Sandra begins as he turns away, and a second voice calls, "Is there enough for three?"

He recognises the voice right away but has to look back just to make sure. Yes: Emily stands in the doorway behind Sandra. Gerry is still Gerry, so the first explanation for this scenario that flashes through his thoughts is admittedly lurid, and he looks askance at his governor, who gazes back placidly.

_Nah_, he thinks. _They can't be_.

"Michael's moving out," Emily says abruptly, and Gerry thinks, _Maybe they are_. "Sandra said I could stay here for a few nights until he gets everything cleared out."

Sandra steps out of the way and Gerry drops one arm around Emily's shoulders as all three of them head for the kitchen. "Oi, what, my gaffe ain't classy enough?"

Emily responds quietly and Sandra concentrates on not listening, instead removing plates and bowls from the cupboard. The buzzer goes again and she slips out to collect the second delivery of the night, lingering to give Gerry and Emily a few minutes and nibbling at a samosa to pass the time. She's starving. The slop they dish up at police college makes the Met's cafeteria look like Gordon Ramsay.

Gerry pokes his head into the hallway as she's contemplating her ability to eat ma ki daal with her bare hands. He fixes her with a solemn look. "Hoarding food, Sandra?" he asks. "Do we need to stage an intervention?"

She merely raises one eyebrow, a move she might or might not have been practicing recently in the bathroom mirror while she brushes her teeth, and says, "The other samosa is for Emily. You can't have it."

"Keep your poncy samosas – I have spring rolls."

"How's work?" Sandra asks a little too casually as the three of them assemble around the rarely-used dining table.

"How's the seminar?" he returns breezily, and since she's not especially eager to answer, she doesn't press Gerry for information about what he, Brian, and Jack have been getting up to in her absence. Gerry allows himself an internal sigh of relief as he serves the soup. He has temporarily dodged a bullet. Sandra will find out about this Ray Arrington business soon enough without his help. Why should he always get stuck being the bearer of bad tidings?

Emily insists on doing the washing up after their very international meal; as the younger woman clears the table, Sandra says, "I'm sorry your date didn't work out, but glad we got to reap the benefits. Honestly, you made the spring rolls? They didn't come frozen from the shop?"

"Makin' spring rolls is a piece of piss," he tosses back, "and you're not a bit sorry things didn't work out with Lee Anne, because now you get to gloat."

"I'm not gloating," she defends herself, topping up their wine glasses. "But yeah, she was all wrong for you. Any idiot could see as much at a glance – except you, I suppose."

"And _I_ suppose you're an expert at picking men, is that it?"

Her bright, amused smile is unexpected and disarming. "Hell, no. I'm crap. The difference is I don't claim to be an expert."

"You wound me."

"If I'm wounding anything it's your fragile ego."

They smile at each other, though.

"What was it you wanted to talk about last night?"

Sandra hesitates, then rises and picks up her glass and the wine bottle. "Let's go in there," she murmurs in a low tone, indicating the living room with her chin, and in a moment they're settled on her sofa. Dishes rattle in the kitchen.

Gerry had belatedly realised that Sandra hadn't actually mentioned Ray Arrington when she'd stormed his citadel the previous evening. Her earlier question about work could've been an oblique reference, but oblique isn't her style at all, so the more Gerry has pondered this, the more perplexed he has become.

Sandra doesn't have Brian's encyclopedic knowledge of police records, so she has to ask. "Did you ever cross paths with a D.I. James Hargreaves?"

Gerry's forehead creases deeply as he considers. "Stocky bloke with dark hair?" he asks vaguely. "Silk ties, Italian blazers, loafers polished so bright they could blind you?" Sandra nods expressionlessly and Gerry continues, "He was the newest hotshot in vice when I was with the paedophile unit. We organized a sting together, rounded up some of the big-time johns who were keeping the rent boys busy round King's Cross."

"Let me guess: it wasn't exactly love at first sight."

Gerry shrugs. "He's the sort of bloke you like less and less the more you get to know him."

Sandra lets loose a single yelp of laughter at the apt description. "Does he have any reason to hold a particular grudge against you?"

"I shouldn't think so. We kept our animosity on a purely professional footing."

Sandra sighs. "I was afraid of as much."

"Too popular for my own good, am I?"

"James Hargreaves is one of Caitlin's instructors. He's accused her of stealing an exam." Before Gerry can start yelling, Sandra heads him off. "I know she didn't do it. I've talked to her and to James. The only 'evidence' he has is the fact that Caitlin earned the best score on the test."

"High marks, hey?"

"The highest: 100 percent. "

"That's my girl!" Gerry declares proudly, and then scowls, as if someone has flipped a switch. "Of course she didn't cheat. Unless you're a complete prat, you'd make sure to get a few answers wrong, wouldn't you? Otherwise you might as well have a neon arrow pointing to your head and a sign that says 'I nicked it.' You think Hargreaves singled Caitlin out because he's got it in for me?"

"He said as much." Sandra presses her lips together. "He's an odious toad, Gerry."

"Oh, you mean, like father, like daughter, that line a' cobblers?" His jaw juts out firmly. "I'm bloody sick and tired of a bunch of desk-jockeying twats accusing me of being dirty," he seethes. "But when they use it as an excuse to screw with one of my kids –"

"I don't think that's it," she interrupts in a very low voice, looking down at the wine in her glass. It's a mellow gold in the light. "Not all of it."

"Caitlin should've come to me," Gerry broods as if he hasn't heard her. "If Hargreaves thinks he's going to use her to settle an old score, he's sadly mistaken. I'll go down there first thing in the morning and –"

"No, you won't," Sandra interrupts again, firmly this time, her eyes zeroing in on his. "Having you in the thick of things shouting blue murder isn't going to do a damn bit of good. Look, Hargreaves reported Caitlin to the director yesterday, and she's already spoken to him. It went well. If anything, Hargreaves has made himself look like a silly arse. Barring any other incidents, Caitlin's going to graduate with the rest of her class."

"Yeah, but the damage has been done, hasn't it? The instructors, the other kids in the class, they're going to look at her now and wonder if she's a chip off the old block." He glowers into the middle distance. "It's the same thing that happened to me, Sandra, only this tosser's started early. They'll be thinking, maybe she's bent, maybe she'd take a bung, maybe –"

"Maybe," Sandra agrees. "But Caitlin can handle herself, Gerry."

Gerry leans back and studies his friend as she sits with her legs drawn up, bare feet tucked under her, and has the completely incongruous thought that this, dropping by Sandra's with dinner, is a lot less stressful than psyching himself up for a date with a near-stranger, and as a consequence, is a lot more pleasant. "You've got a lot of confidence in my girl."

"I do." She gives him her very brightest smile this time, the one that makes her eyes nearly disappear. "And I've gotten to spend a good bit of time with her these last few days. She can handle it; she _is_ handling it."

"And you're 'elpin' 'er," Gerry concludes, evidently having decided that the letter H is superfluous. "You're more involved in this than you're lettin' on. You talked to Hargreaves, probably talked to the director too, yeah?" She doesn't bother denying it. "Thank you, Sandra. That means a lot, you know, that you'd stand up for 'er when I'm not there." He breaks off and glances toward the kitchen. "And for that one in there, too," he adds in a lower voice.

"Emily's a friend," she rejoins softly. "And as for the other – yeah, I'm involved, all right, but I'm no one's fairy godmother."

"Glenda the Good Witch?"

"Wrong story, Gerald, but no." He smirks, imagining her in flounces of pink tulle and clutching a magic wand. She'd look ridiculous. She'd also look absolutely beautiful… as she beat the shit out of whoever had had the temerity to imagine her in such a ridiculous get-up. _Right – Reality_.

"I think I may be playing the role of the old hag with the poisoned apple," she continues, and Gerry frowns.

"How do you mean?"

Sandra sighs, rolling her stiff neck to the side and wincing in discomfort. "You're right that Hargreaves is trying to use Caitlin to settle an old store, but I'm not sure how much it's actually got to do with you."

He frowns, "Wot, he's got it in for you too, has he?"

"You could say that. If he could give you _and_ me a black eye, I reckon it would make his month."

"I know why he doesn't like me; what's he got against you?"

"He's got it in his head that I stole his promotion – among other things."

Gerry's lip curls. "Oh, Sandra, you _didn't_," he groans feelingly, and she knows he's not referring to her advancement in rank.

Normally she'd fob him off with a supercilious "It's none of your business," but this time it rather is. "Unfortunately I did," she confirms wryly. "We worked AMIP together in the mid-90s."

Gerry succeeds, barely, in containing a shudder. "So what, he hates your guts for leavin' 'im flat?"

"As a matter of fact, he dumped me." Her humiliation is tempered by her next statement. "He decided I could be bad for his career. There was room for one of us in our AMIP area to move up to DCI, and he was determined that it would be him. I suppose it's all right for DI's to screw their colleagues, but not DCI's."

"Didn't want to be sleeping with the enemy, then."

"I don't think he ever saw me as serious competition." She smirks. "So imagine his – surprise – when I was promoted. He never did make it past DI."

The gleam of satisfaction in her eyes is so perfectly her that Gerry can't help grinning even as he says, "Sandra – that _twat_? What did you _see _in him?" He's not sure he wants to know, but a sort of sick curiosity impels him to ask.

The blonde shrugs. "I told you I have crap taste. He can be very charming when he chooses to be."

"I'm bleedin' charmin'!" Gerry squawks, outraged, and Sandra can't contain the laughter that bubbles up merrily from her chest. After a couple of beats he joins her. "I'm too nice; that's what it is," he decides, and she laughs harder.

"Yeah, Gerry, that's your problem," she agrees facetiously, and Gerry ignores the twinge he feels in the vicinity of his left ventricle.

"It sounds like I'm missing the party," Emily says as she emerges from the kitchen. "Swords sheathed, then?"

"I thought it was taking you an awfully long time to wash a few plates," Sandra observes wryly, scooting over to make room for Emily on the sofa.

"No, no, carry on," the brunette says, waving her back. "I'm knackered and I have a report to go over, so I think I'll just take it to bed with me. Sandra, you're sure you don't mind that I'm –"

"Good night, Emily," Sandra cuts her off.

"Want me to come tuck you in?" Gerry jokes, and Emily fires back, "You use that line on your dates, Dad?"

Gerry turns to Sandra. "The women I take out are not that much younger than I am," he protests, and she mildly responds, "No," more interested in taking the dregs of the wine (which is also not chardonnay).

"How's she doing?"

Even if he weren't looking in the direction of her guest room, Sandra wouldn't have to ask who. "As well as you can do in the circumstances, I think."

"I thought she was a bit funny earlier," he admits, putting his empty glass down on the coffee table. "Almost like she expected me to be upset with her. Me, with my track record!"

"Not upset, just concerned." Sandra offers a small smile. "Isn't this the part of the job you wanted me to warn her about – lest she end up a defenceless elderly old maid such as myself?"

"Hah-bloody-hah, Sandra. I just don't want her to be unhappy. I don't want her to be lonely."

"Being alone and being lonely aren't the same thing," she responds instantly, intense blue eyes meeting his.

Gerry hesitates, well aware that he needs to tread lightly or, better still, not tread at all. But he can't help remembering the melancholy softness of Sandra's voice when she'd spoken to him Monday evening beside her father's grave, and he asks, "Don't you ever get lonely?"

She blinks quickly, surprised but not, he thinks, irritated. "Of course I do," she replies frankly. "Everyone does. But I'm not unhappy."

"But you could be happier."

Sandra studies him for several seconds, unsure whether it was a statement or a question, before she says, "Sometimes I think so. But who the hell is perfectly content, Gerry? Not only is it a stupid idea, but it would be bloody boring."

"I didn't say 'perfectly content,'" he replies, unusually serious. "Even you must occasionally wish there was somebody there to listen to you moan about your day or to kiss goodnight or, hell, just to watch a bit of telly."

_Even me_, she thinks, but points out, "We're watching telly." She resumes in a new tone: "Jesus, Gerry, are you _trying_ to depress me? I said I'm happy enough, except at the moment you're starting to piss me off."

"You deserve more than 'happy enough,'" he insists doggedly. Perhaps his daughter's presence down the hall emboldens him to speak to Sandra about what is usually a clearly demarcated no man's land, but whatever the case, he suddenly thinks it needs to be said.

Sandra regards him expressionlessly. Gerry thinks she's deciding whether or not to be seriously hacked off. "Why?" she finally challenges. "Plenty of people are completely sodding miserable. I think I'm doing pretty well."

Gerry is almost embarrassed. "Because you're not just anybody," he returns simply. "You're you."

She is utterly taken aback and it shows in her widening eyes and slightly parted lips. She can't decide whether to hug him or roll her eyes and take the piss, so she does neither. "That's – You deserve that too, Gerry," she says slowly. "I hope you find it."

She lays her hand on the back of his, nothing more than a natural, friendly pat, but then she seems to forget to draw back. The gesture itself is completely innocent, but it's complicated by their mutual awareness of it; and so they remain motionless, warm skin lightly touching, eyeing one another warily.

He somehow finds his voice, although he has to clear his throat awkwardly first. "You think I've been lookin' in the wrong places?"

It's exactly what she said to Emily a couple of hours earlier, but now she's almost afraid to answer. Sandra Pullman doesn't scare easily, however, and a response is on the tip of her tongue when she hears the generic voice of an onscreen news reader pronounce a name that ricochets through every cell in her body and seizes her entire attention.

"That bastard!" she exclaims as she aims the remote at the screen, increasing the volume, and Gerry feels a bit queasy – and not only because he's just lost what might, conceivably, have been a golden, shining, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he has only realised he really, really wanted in the approximately 7.5 seconds since he lost it.

The face on the screen belongs to Raymond Arrington, but the strident voice is his daughter's.

"Sixteen years ago," Lorelai informs a small group of reporters against the backdrop of what Gerry instantly knows as the Met's uninspiring façade, "the Metropolitan Police and the criminal courts failed an innocent man." She thrusts a snapshot of the pater familias at the nearest cameraman's lens. Gerry feels the straining rigidity of Sandra's muscles as she hovers next to him. "My father has been jailed and silenced for horrific crimes he did not commit – as the four recent murders around London all too clearly illustrate. Well, I won't be silenced until I have justice for my father and our family."

"Your father had justice," Sandra grits out, and Gerry looks uneasily at her. _Thanks a lot, Brian, you sad anorak. _

"Finally, after a decade and a half of willful ignorance and blindness, if not deliberate corruption on the part of the Met, today my father is one step closer to freedom. His case has officially been reopened by the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad."

Sandra literally comes off the sofa, rising to her feet in disbelieving fury. Gerry would like to be able to say later that he didn't cower, but he's fairly certain that would be a lie. She turns very slowly to loom over him, hands on her hips, and he actually shivers. He has never before seen the look on the governor's face, and he certainly never wants to see it again.

Her words come out in a serpentine hiss, as if she's too angry to shout: "I don't suppose it crossed your tiny mind to _tell_ me about this complete, flaming cock-up?"

**_I'm worried that I may be boring you all too tears. Let me know if you've made it this far; I love your reviews. I promise things will start to move more quickly now!_**


	6. Something There to Remind You

Chapter summary: Sandra gets mad, gets madder, stays mad, and plays hide-and-seek with fruits. It makes sense in context, honestly.

**Chapter Six: Something There to Remind You**

"We are not Radio bloody One, Brian. We don't take requests."

This is Sandra's greeting to the troops Thursday morning in response to Jack's innocent, "Ah, Sandra, how was the course?"

"What about more of a cover band doing greatest hits?" Brian deadpans dangerously. Sandra stares him down, face expressionless, eyes snapping with white heat, until the ex-D.I. gulps.

Without warning she wheels on Jack. "I expect this kind of behaviour from _him_," she seethes, flinging an arm toward Brian in disgust, "but I thought you were _capable_ of doing your job."

Brian glares morosely at his desk and Jack becomes a shade more pallid than usual. Gerry, a couple of minutes late, does his best to blend in with the coat rack.

"Sandra –"

"Why in the hell did I just hear about this last night on the news?" she shouts in Jack's face, and slaps one of the daily rags down on the table so they all have a clear view. MET ADMITS MISTAKE IN SERIAL MURDER CASE, screams the headline, but its volume can't compete with Sandra's.

"I know you worked this case," Jack begins, but she cuts him off.

"Yeah, I did. And we closed it. We caught the right man, who is exactly where he belongs: in prison, rotting behind bars for the rest of his sorry excuse for a life. Did any of you bother reviewing the evidence before you let daddy's little princess talk three sad old men in their dotage into reopening this case?"

The line of Jack's mouth has grown thinner and thinner while Sandra has railed at them, and now he draws himself up to his full height. "Oh, Sandra, that never occurred to us! If only you'd been here." Given that Gerry has seen the governor similarly furious only once before – when she'd learned the truth about her father's death – he's inclined to think bearding the lion in its den is unsound policy, but Jack's keen bright eyes burn with anger. "We never told that girl we'd reopen her father's case."

"Maybe you didn't," she retorts. "But what about _him_?"

Brian has that stolid, mulish look that means trouble. "I know you and Jane Tennison are confident that you got the right man, but maybe you made a mist-"

He hasn't finished the second syllable of the word when she erupts. "Bollocks," she pronounces, snapping up the newspaper. "If a mistake has been made, you're making it right now by wasting UCOS time and money on that bastard and his daughter." The crumpled paper sails directly into the rubbish bin as she glares at all three of them. "I'm not wasting another minute of my time on this bullshit," she declares through clenched teeth. "You three idiots got us into this mess; now you get us out."

Sandra storms straight out of the office, slamming the door so hard that the glass rattles precariously. Gerry looks after her and frowns.

"The lack of evidence does indicate –"

"Shut up, Brian," Jack mutters shortly, and stalks to his own desk.

Two hours later Strickland finds Sandra sitting over a tepid cup of coffee in a back corner of their local. "Sir," she greets him evenly when she looks up from the screen of her mobile and sees her superior there.

"The others told me I'd probably find you here. Mind if I sit?"

The superintendent has been anticipating this little tete-a-tete since last night's press conference, but the DAC doesn't sound as furious as he should be. Sandra wordlessly indicates the vacant place at the table.

"This business with Raymond Arrington is unfortunate," Strickland begins, smoothing his tie.

"Evidently his daughter is very persuasive," Sandra replies, too angry to defend her team outright, but too loyal to hang them out to dry.

"Yes. I met her myself last night when she staged her guerilla press conference."

Sandra seeks her boss's eyes, suddenly gripped by a sickening thought. "Don't tell me she's convinced you too."

"No, Sandra. But I have read the files and looked at the evidence, and I spoke to Chief Superintendent Modell, who is, as you're no doubt aware, leading the inquiry into the five current murders."

"Five?" she echoes, arrested.

He nods grimly. "Megan Carver, 34. A pensioner taking her dog for an early-morning walk found the body."

Sandra's gaze flickers to the dark brown liquid in her cup. "Shit," she says tonelessly.

"The press is in a feeding frenzy," Strickland says simply. "A serial murderer ranging around London with impunity is bad enough; now we have Lorelai Arrington telling anyone who'll listen that it's because we cocked up fifteen years ago."

"We didn't," Sandra grinds out.

"I'm not saying you got it wrong, Sandra, but the person responsible for these attacks is intimately familiar with Arrington's M.O. UCOS's remit for now is to do everything in your power to assist David Modell and stop this – haemorrhaging, quite frankly. This is a public relations nightmare," her boss replies, his shoulders tense beneath his suit jacket.

"Meaning exactly what?"

"Do what you do best. You and Jack and Brian and Gerry go over every detail of those files and scout up anyone who could conceivably be worth talking to. It's a long shot, Sandra, but you and the boys could crack this thing wide open. Imagine what that could mean for you."

Sandra has no choice but to imagine. Her vision isn't the one Strickland has in mind.

Fifteen minutes later Sandra walks into the office, shucks her jacket off, and marches to the marker board, where she begins removing photos from a manila folder and clipping them up. Ray Arrington's mug shot and a snap of Lorelai from the press conference join three crime scene photos depicting lifeless women and several luridly-coloured close-ups of the injuries on one survivor's body.

Jack, Brian, and Gerry exchange glances behind the governor's back.

"We're taking it on?" Gerry asks flatly.

"Our remit is to assist the current inquiry by reinvestigating the four previous attacks committed by Ray Arrington."

Brian is taken aback. "If we proceed with the assumption that Arrington is the guilty party and limit ourselves to looking for evidence to confirm that, we'll only be –"

"Committed by Ray Arrington," Sandra repeats with icy calm. "Congratulations, Brian. You've cherry-picked the case you wanted for our next UCOS investigation, and I promise you this: if you let Raymond Arington manipulate this investigation and use it as an excuse to get a new trial, this will be your _last_ UCOS case." Her quelling gaze bounces from Gerry to Jack. "That goes for you two as well. So get on with it."

Later that afternoon Gerry has gone to hunt up the other members of the AMIP team that spent five months looking for Ray Arrington in the summer and autumn of 1994, and he has carted Brian with him under the assumption that it will be better for the ex-D.I.'s health if Sandra doesn't see him for the next few hours. This leaves Jack meticulously combing through incident reports now sixteen years old.

Sandra is in her office with the door closed and the blinds drawn; Jack hasn't heard a peep out of her since she issued her edict before lunch. Now he stands – ugh, his back is giving him hell – marches over to that closed door, raps twice, and doesn't wait for a response. "Stun gun," he announces with no inflection.

She is slow to look away from the computer monitor, but he isn't fooled: Sandra isn't working, just gazing at the reflective screen. "What of it?"

"The person who raped and murdered these three women in 1994 subdued his victims using a highly charged stun gun, a model illegal in the UK and only produced in the States."

"I'm well aware of that, Jack."

"Are you also well aware that the perpetrator of the current attacks is using a stun gun of the same make and model, which hasn't been manufactured since July of 1996?" he queries, his consonants unusually clipped.

The blonde lifts her eyes to his, and Jack is surprised by their expression. The hostility slams into him like cement. So much for her having had time to cool down and come to her senses. "So?" she asks in that same brusque, uninterested tone.

"Seems like a _bit_ of a coincidence." Jack folds his arms and waits for a response until he gets tired of waiting. "In '95 the stun gun was never recovered, not in Ray Arrington's house, car, or lock-up, despite the fact that he seemingly had no time to dispose of it between attacking Melanie Tyler and being nicked by your lot."

"Well, he obviously did dispose of it, didn't he, if someone is rampaging round Wimbledon with it," she snaps. "Unless you're suggesting that he's committing these crimes telepathically from his jail cell."

"Unless he never had it in the first place." Before she can start yelling her head off he continues, "He could have had an accomplice."

"No," Sandra insists stubbornly, her eyes still locked on his. "There was no trace of an accomplice."

"Technically there was no trace of Arrington either," Jack points out. "No blood, no saliva, no semen, not so much as a thumbprint."

"One of the hallmarks of the crimes was his extreme fastidiousness. That's why it took us nearly six months to catch him. – Jesus, Jack, what are you, the defence council?"

"I'm unbiased," he replies tersely. "One of us has to be, and it's a cinch it's not you, Sandra."

She looks as if she's clenching her teeth, but she says nothing.

The main office door opens and Jack glances over his shoulder at his returning colleagues before addressing her in a low voice. "I don't know what it is about this case that's gotten under your skin," he says, "but you need to take a step back. If you can't do your job, then at least don't get in the way of us doing ours."

She shoots to her feet. "I happen to be rather good at my job, and if you'd done yours as deputy, we wouldn't have this investigation being rammed down our throats," she replies with frigid fury, and brushes past him. "How did it go?" she asks abruptly in a much louder voice, looking from Gerry to Brian.

"Er, fine," Gerry responds when Brian doesn't say anything. "We talked to Rich Haskins, who's over at Hampton Row, and ex-D.S. John Lily."

"You'll want to speak to D.I. James Hargreaves as well. Brian, you and Jack can do that in the morning." The blonde directs her attention to the photographs on the marker board.

"Do you want to pay Arrington a visit?"

"No, not yet." Sandra looks the mug shot in the eye for a few more seconds before turning to Gerry. "He's not going anywhere."

Brian thinks his entrails are safe for the moment, so works up sufficient courage to say, "What about Melanie Tyler?"

"What about her?" Sandra returns, walking over to the kettle, but when she gets there she just looks at it. It's half four; she doesn't really want tea, just something to do with her hands.

Brian and Gerry look warily at one another. "She's the only witness. Surely interviewing her should be our top priority."

"I disagree."

Jack can no longer contain himself. "Sandra, she's the only surviving victim. Arrington was convicted on the strength of her testimony."

"Exactly," she returns instantly, hands coming to rest on her hips. "And it's all on record, as are the countless interviews she gave us before the trial. Have a go at reading it."

"We have done," says Brian in a quiet monotone. "Melanie was the final victim. The attacker surprised her by the Thames during her walk home from work – the route she regularly took on fine evenings. The attack followed the usual script until the final act, when the attacker made a mistake. He cut her throat and left her to bleed out, but the cut was shallow and Melanie was found alive by Michael Halings, a security guard."

"Yeah," Gerry puts in. "Halings was night watchman for the builders of the Blue Water Tower, which was just goin' up then, remember?"

"That monstrosity," Jack groans.

"A boil on the arse of South London," Gerry agrees, and Sandra's complexion washes an ominous pink.

"Architecture aside, Melanie Tyler was found alive – barely – and after extensive surgery to repair as much of the damage as possible, she recovered enough to give us a description. Arrington wore a face mask during the three previous attacks, but not for Melanie's. That gave us enough to lift him. We'd had him in for questioning twice before, but couldn't hold him." Her expression takes on a faraway cast. "Tennison had this fabulous, terrifying ability of extracting a confession from almost anyone. She made them really believe she empathized with them. Serial killers, child abusers, arsonists, pimps – But not Arrington."

"He never confessed," Jack states, and she replies with a one-shouldered shrug.

"No, like ninety-five percent of the prison population, Arrington, the defenceless lamb, is banged up for something he didn't do. But Melanie identified him in the courtroom."

"After an ordeal like that, she could've been confused or –"

"She could've been, but she wasn't."

"I know you don't want to hear this, gov," Gerry begins, "but what about the possibility that Arrington attacked Melanie, but not the others?"

"Oh, right, he just happened to keep turning up in the wrong place at the right time."

"I'm not saying he wasn't involved somehow, but look." Gerry walks around his desk to examine the photos on the board. "He deviated from his pattern," he says, indicating the photos of Melanie's battered form. "Didn't cover his face, left the victim alive to identify him – He got sloppy. Where's our neat freak?"

"Same stun gun," the detective superintendent responds shortly. "Same victim profile, same time frame, same careful absence of DNA. We were convinced, and so were the members of the jury."

The three men look silently and steadily at her, and Sandra feels their disapproval flowing toward her in waves. "Look," she sighs, "I'm not saying we won't interview Melanie. But until we're one hundred percent sure there's a damn good reason, we have no business forcing that woman to rehearse every minute detail of the most horrible event of her life."

It would be hard to argue with that, and none of them particularly wants to make the attempt. "What's my task, then?" Gerry asks after a moment of silence, and Sandra almost smiles at his reluctant schoolboy tone.

"You're with me. I thought we'd have a chat with Raymond Arrington's number one fan."

Sandra fights with her unwieldy keys and her recalcitrant mobile, which is burring impatiently but hiding in the cavernous recesses of her shoulder bag, before managing to launch herself into her flat, drop all the groceries she's carrying, and breathlessly gasp, "Hello?"

"Hey, Sandra, I thought I was going to get your voicemail again," says her affable half-brother, and Sandra watches an apple roll under her dining table.

"I didn't know you were trying to reach me." She doesn't mean to sound so brusque, as if he's a business acquaintance of whom she's not overly fond. She thought she was getting marginally better at this having-a-brother thing, but maybe it's a dance in the wrong direction: one step forward, two steps back.

"I just, ah – You're busy."

"No." She reaches up with her left hand to rub awkwardly at her aching neck. "That is, yes, but right now I'm just knackered. It's been a pretty shit day, frankly."

"I read in the paper about this Raymond Arrington." In response she groans, and he hastily reassures, "Don't worry, I didn't call to talk about that. I'm in the meat trade, remember? I'm not an investigative journalist."

"Thank Christ for that." She tucks the mobile between her shoulder and ear and begins to retrieve fallen produce. "It's, ah, it's been a while."

"Didn't want to be a pest," he replies easily, and she winces. "I rang Monday because of, ah, because of – your – our –"

The semantic problem is an awkward one. Sandra rescues him as best she can. "I saw your flowers. They were pretty. Bright," she says, and winces again at her own inanity.

"I didn't know if you'd find it intrusive."

"No," she says, and realizes she means it. "It was a nice gesture. Mum always insists on lilies, but honestly I think he would've liked the daisies better."

"I didn't – that is, he could've been the peony type."

"He wasn't," she assures with more warmth.

"I don't know much about him, Sandra. Just what you've told me, and then what I read in the newspaper – after. But he was my father too."

She doesn't think Tom intends it as a reproach, but her own guilt makes it feel like one. "He was," she echoes.

"So, the reason for my call."

"Yeah." Oh, damn, she knew she shouldn't have bought grapes; there are about eight of them lying under the buffet, just out of reach, taunting her.

"I'd like to have a photo of him."

_Oh, shit_, Sandra thinks, horrified. She evidently has not improved at the having-a-brother thing. It has never occurred to her that Tom might want a photograph, some sort of memento of the father he knew slightly and can't remember; and yet she carries one with her at all times, still, tucked behind her warrant card.

"Sandra?"

"I – of course. Yeah, of course."

"Would you like to go for a drink one night after work?"

"We could do that." _Come on, Sandra. Make an effort_. "Or you could come here for dinner and look through all the photos I have, so you could choose for yourself. I don't cook," she clarifies hastily, "but I'm very good with take-away."

"Take-away is fine," Tom replies, and she can tell that he's smiling; he has one of those voices that are easy to read. "Take-away's great."

"I hope you like Indian," she says after they've tentatively agreed on one evening the following week, barring the possibility that this sodding investigation will blow up in Sandra's face.

"Love it."

"That's encouraging," his half-sister rejoins. "We do have something in common besides DNA, then."

Despite Ray Arrington, despite this awful day, despite everything, when Sandra rings off she's smiling a little too.

_Please, please let me know if you're reading. I appreciate all the reviews so much. _

_Also, as you may have noticed, my computer has a personality conflict with this site, and the site occasionally retaliates by eating all the spaces between different sections of a chapter, no matter how diligently I shift + enter. If that has happened again, I apologise. Otherwise, I apologise in advance for the next time when it will inevitably happen._


	7. High Stakes

A bit of a change of pace from the last chapter. Hope you enjoy.

**Chapter Seven: High Stakes**

1.

"You're not supposed to be smoking here," Sandra says in a tone that stops short of actually suggesting Gerry alter his behaviour, and he responds with a philosophical shrug and a long draw on his Marlboro. The governor is aggressively blonde in the morning sunlight. Gerry approves. He's passing the time by imagining her kitted out in something very tight and appealingly trashy when she addresses him again.

"Go for paternal, would you?"

He nearly chokes on his fag. "Excuse me?"

"When Lorelai Arrington comes out. You have two speeds, Gerry, and the last thing we need is you ogling the girl, so strive for something more paternal in nature, would you?"

"I'm a little old for university students, don't you think?" he replies testily.

"Obviously. But when has what I thought ever stopped you? You've been standing there with your tongue practically hanging out."

_Oh, if only you knew_. He presses his lips together to hide the smile that threatens. "Better my tongue than my –"

"Oh, shut it."

"There she is," Gerry replies, all business, his light eyes fixed on the petite brunette as she walks slowly down the steps of the building where her Friday morning lecture on the Victorian novel has just let out. Her eyes are trained on the printed paper she holds.

Sandra's mobile goes and she glances at the screen, annoyed. "It's Brian – Go on ahead and stop her."

"This is not a good time," she answers as Gerry strides off.

"No, it's a terrible time. Just ask Melanie Tyler," he replies dismally, and Sandra allows her eyes to close – just for a second, she tells herself.

"Not now, Brian. Melanie Tyler can wait."

"No, she can't. That's why I phoned."

Lorelai waves at someone in a parked car and Gerry slows his pace, watching her as she moves toward the driver's side window.

"Would you care to explain?"

"I succeeded just a bit ago in tracking her down. She's been living in Yorkshire since 1999. Works as a potter. Her husband is a long-distance lorry driver. It's quite a far cry from the life she left behind in the City."

"This is fascinating, Brian, but –"

"She's dying."

Sandra's response is dead silence.

"She has end-stage pancreatic cancer. She's in a hospice outside York."

"Shit."

"According to the medical staff she's got a few days, a week at the outside. Given the circumstances, Sandra –"

"I know." The clouds chasing one another frantically across the bright sky make patterns on Sandra's closed eyelids. "Yes, we need to talk to her, even if it's as brief as having her state on the record that she stands by her testimony."

"I've got me mini-recorder at the ready. Jack and I can –"

"No." The brilliance has her squinting, pained, the instant her eyes reopen. "No, this was my case. I'm going." There is a lengthy pause, and she knows what Brian is thinking but hesitant to say. "Gerry and I, I mean," she clarifies rather testily. "Ms. Arrington can wait. We'll head up now."

"You want me to email you directions?" Brian asks, placated since at least Sandra isn't storming off on her own.

"Thanks, Brian." As she pockets her mobile she is already beckoning to Gerry, who stands with his hands shoved in his pockets as he talks to Lorelai and the driver of the car, a shaggy-haired bloke who looks to be in his mid-twenties. Gerry hesitates, and Sandra signals again, impatiently. By the time he returns to her the car is cranked and she's waiting with her hand cradling the gear shift.

"Where exactly are we going?" he asks on the heels of her succinct explanation.

"York." She fumbles for her sunglasses and successfully manages to shield her eyes one-handed.

Gerry considers for a moment, watching the sunlight bounce crazily off the traffic ahead. "You know what they say," he finally offers in a terrible imitation of Brian's accent. "It's grim up North."

Sandra ignores him, but if her expression is anything to go by, she agrees.

A few hours later they've both become even grimmer. The sun, as if in accordance with their mood, has modestly retired behind a thick screen of threatening grey clouds. Silence hangs heavily between them, but both are reluctant to be the one to break it. As an intermediate step Gerry lights a cigarette, and Sandra casts him an oddly sympathetic, almost envious look and says nothing about the possibility that the car park outside a hospice is not the most appropriate spot for a fag break. It seems now like the ideal spot. She too would like to laugh in the face of death.

"I thought I hated hospitals, but Christ, in comparison to these places –" She breaks off with a shudder.

Gerry looks reflectively at his cigarette. "You think so?" he wonders, unusually philosophical. "I can see how it could be more peaceful for the people here – If they've accepted that it's the end."

"Mmm," says Sandra, disgruntled, and Gerry tries to imagine his friend facing death with resignation. "Come on, let's go. You can roll the window down."

She must really want to get out of here if she's willing to let him smoke in the car. Gerry can't blame her, but – "So what now, gov?"

They haven't spoken to Melanie Tyler, who has enough morphine running through her body to keep her in a twilight state, hovering between life and death. "She's most alert in the mornings," a young, dark-haired nurse had informed them in a hushed voice. "She has lucid intervals then, early in the day. If you woke her now you'd not get any sense out of her."

Gerry and Sandra had just glanced at one another. No way in hell would they disturb a dying woman only to increase her physical and mental suffering.

"I'll stay the night," Sandra says, fastening her seatbelt. "I can drive you to the train station and –"

"No," he interrupts firmly, and she looks askance at him. "If you're stayin', I'm stayin'."

For a few seconds she considers protesting, insisting that he return to London to carry out some menial task, but honestly she's grateful for the company. "I suppose we can squeeze two rooms at the Travel Lodge into the UCOS budget," she agrees.

"Well, I know there's a financial crisis on an' all. If we need to save money, we could always both –"

"If we need to save money that badly, we'll eliminate the tea budget," she retorts, and pulls out onto the A road.

She doesn't pilot them to the Travel Lodge, though, but abruptly follows a sign to a bed and breakfast lodged in a rambling old farmhouse at only a five minutes' drive from the hospice. "Looks a bit posh for our money," Gerry observes, and Sandra shrugs.

"Yeah, but it doesn't hurt to ask, does it? This looks a hell of a lot nicer than some characterless chain hotel, and we'd be as close as possible to Melanie. I'll pop in and ask about the rates."

Her mobile vibrates and she shoots it an irritated glance before answering, "Sandra Pullman." Gerry lightly touches her shoulder and volunteers, "I'll go have a butcher's."

Sandra's conversation with Strickland, though uneventful, does nothing to improve her disposition. She's perfectly capable of handling a high-profile investigation; the last thing she wants is her boss tracking her every movement. Surely Jack and Brian wouldn't have gone so far as to put him up to this, would they?

She chastises herself for the disloyal thought. The higher-ups must be in a tizzy. The D.A.C. has to be receiving at least as much pressure as he's passing on to her.

Gerry raps on the window and displays two large, heavy-looking brass keys, and Sandra's face brightens measurably. "Really?" she asks as she swings the door open.

"Must be low season. They've got one of those poncy Michelin-starred gastropubs, too. Been featured in the _Times_ an' all."

"You sound like Brian," she tosses back as they crunch up the gravel path.

"Well, it's a cinch I won't be askin' if they do a nice pie and chips."

"Does this Michelin-starred pub come with Michelin-starred prices? Because I seriously doubt that the Met –"

"Oh, come on, Sandra," he wheedles. "We can't stay here and not eat in the restaurant; it's why people come from the whole of England. What kind of a peasant are you?"

She bites her lip, sorely tempted.

"Live a little," he urges, and somehow that does it. Gerry can light up outside the hospice; Sandra will scoff at death by hoovering up something sinfully fattening and delicious, and she won't feel guilty about it.

"Sod it," she decides. "I'll have a go at expensing it."

2.

A scraping sound wakes Sandra from the nap she hadn't intended to take and she starts, jerking upright to see Gerry near the foot of the bed, completely motionless, as if he's determined to win a game of freeze tag.

"What the hell?" she grouses.

"Ah, sorry, gov." He drops something on the bureau. She hears the unmistakable jangle of keys landing on a wooden surface, and her bleary eyes narrow.

"You took my car?"

"You were sleeping," he defends himself mildly, "and you looked sort of – peaceful. I didn't want to disturb you."

She does a species of crab walk backward toward the headboard. "Jesus, you watched me _sleep_?"

"I saw that you _were_ sleeping," he clarifies with exaggerated patience. "I didn't stand here gazing soulfully at you."

His words drip with sarcasm and she doesn't bother repressing a grin. "Peaceful, huh?"

"Yeah, it happens once in a while, on the rare occasions when your mouth is shut for more than fifteen seconds."

She chooses to ignore that, still too groggy for a battle of wits. "Where'd you get to?"

"Into town to get us a few things. It so happens I left me portmanteau at home. – Your lot's in there," he says, tilting his head toward the bathroom.

She is touched by his thoughtfulness for approximately three seconds until another thought occurs and she glares at him. "How the hell did you get in my room?"

"You left the door unlocked, Detective Superintendent," he returns, sailing toward the corridor. "Dinner at half seven. I booked us a table. You might want to consider fixin' yourself up a bit."

The pillow she hurls after him bounces innocuously off the closing door.

Part of Sandra wants to close her eyes again and sleep for about forty-eight hours. That's the part of her having difficulty scouting up the energy to run a brush through her hair, reapply the few cosmetics she has in her handbag, and make small talk through a three-course dinner. There is nothing, nothing she likes about this investigation. That Melanie Tyler has the colossally bad luck to be lying in a hospital bed, dying by inches, after life has already given her such a shit surprise in the form of Ray Arrington, infuriates Sandra. She is disgusted with life and outraged at the God she doesn't believe in.

So she should probably go have a spectacular meal, at least. If this is the hand fate has dealt, she might as well play it to the best of her ability and bet high. Enjoy the game, because the house always wins in the end.

The restaurant is cozy but upscale enough that Sandra is glad she happened to wear respectable trousers and heels today instead of jeans. Gerry looks right at home sitting at a two-person table awaiting the arrival of his dinner companion – as well he should. He must get enough practice. Or at least his alter ego must, the one she has never met (thank God), Gerry the Date. She tries to imagine a date with Gerry, but the thought is too ludicrous. It lends a surreal cast to her short walk across the dining room. To all outward appearances they blend in with the sea of couples enjoying a romantic weekend away for a birthday or an anniversary or just for the hell of it. Dead disturbing, that. And maybe just the tiniest bit appealing, which is even _more_ disturbing. She isn't sure whether to laugh maniacally or run screaming, so she settles for looking appalled and saying, "We are _not_ married," when the polite young hostess informs her that her husband is waiting for her to order the wine.

Gerry catches her eye and offers her an affable grin as she approaches, and she finds herself grinning back. His eyes twinkle and Sandra knows they're sharing the secret of the fake date.

"This is the part where I compliment you on your appearance, isn't it?"

Her eyes narrow. "Do it and I'll order a nice bottle of chardonnay for us to share."

He instead asks, "Have you spoken to Jack or Brian?" and she orders sancerre.

After they've ordered their starters (bacon-wrapped apricots for him, oysters for her) and main courses (scallops and skate respectively), they reach another roadblock: the investigation isn't exactly suitable dinner conversation. They've spent enough time together recently that she already knows all about what the girls are up to – about Emily and Caitlin she may know more than their father does – and she is definitely not in the mood for a catalogue of his more colourful sexual exploits. She glances down at her bread plate and fiddles with her butter knife, momentarily at a loss.

"See that couple by the window? Don't turn round and look."

Sandra sips her wine, casually props her chin on her fist, and takes a good long look over her shoulder at a well-dressed sixtyish woman and her much younger companion.

"Well?"

Sandra blinks. "Mother and son."

"Nah." Gerry sips his own wine and smirks. "Frustrated housewife from – let's see, Leeds – havin' it away with her old school chum's son, who needs a bit of cash to pursue his dream of opening a chain of strip clubs where the girls dress like nuns."

She grins. "And you know this because?"

"She's footin' the bill but she let him order the wine, and look at her shoes. She's not used to heels like that; her feet hurt."

"Yeah," she agrees, reluctantly amused, "that is the most natural explanation."

"Next?" he prompts, and she considers, welcoming the diversion. God bless Gerry for thinking of a way to take the piss out of this forced intimacy. It's still cool enough in the evenings to have a fire, and the light from the huge stone fireplace flickers at Sandra's back, leaving shadowy fingers of darkness in the corners. The wine is excellent. It has been quite a while since she's been anywhere this nice. She used to do this, in another life: go away for the weekend and leave the police behind.

Of course, she's not away for the weekend, and she's certainly brought the Detective Superintendent along, and, oh yes, she's with Gerry, not someone she's involved with – not that way.

But she's having a good time.

"There," she says. "Far table in the corner."

Gerry looks at the young, dark-haired woman and her blond boyfriend, who is still young enough to look slightly awkward in his blazer and tie. They're twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, and he has probably been saving up for ages to afford this place. Gerry recognizes the scenario immediately, and obligingly provides the obvious narrative. "They met at university," he says. "Graduated… about a year ago. He's a solicitor; she's an elementary school teacher. See how nervous he is? He's waitin' for the right moment to pop the question. Blimey, I know what that feels like, poor bugger."

She chuckles. "Maybe you could go over and give him some pointers. Too bad you're wrong."

His grin is warm. "Am I?"

Sandra nods knowingly. "He's nervous because she's blackmailing him," she says definitely. "She's a high-class escort, and she's gotten him into all sorts: drugs, gambling, whatever you fancy. He's into her for, oh, say fifty thousand, and she's threatening to grass him up to his father, who's the M.P. for… Bradford. She's got photos, and she's going to give them to the tabloids unless he comes up with the money."

"Bradford, eh?"

"Bradford," she repeats, and they share a smile. "Imagine what they're saying about us."

"Not much, I suspect," Gerry responds, topping up her wine. "We blend in."

They do, which is exactly what makes Sandra so uncomfortable. She takes a healthy swallow of her wine and forces a smile.

The food is excellent, but the atmosphere is becoming a bit cloying. Sandra has had her eye on the lemon soufflé since she first glanced at the menu, so missing dessert is not an option, but she's had enough of sitting in this dining room feeling like she's playing a part – or rather, feeling like she's not exactly playing a part.

"Do you want to have dessert upstairs?" she murmurs, and then flushes beet red as she realizes their very discreet waiter has overheard her words and completely misconstrued them. "I mean –"

Gerry smiles wryly. "_I_ know what you meant, Sandra."

They end up wedged into the lift with the young couple, who seem completely oblivious to their presence, perhaps because the woman now sports a very shiny, very new diamond ring. The close quarters don't deter the newly-engaged couple from going at it like the world might end before they make it up to the third floor. Sandra and Gerry naturally seek one another's eyes to exchange a mutual look of annoyed amusement, but it goes on too long and becomes something else, itself a source of increased discomfort. Still neither of them looks away, not until the car grinds to a halt on the third floor and the others tumble out into the corridor. Sandra and Gerry step out more sedately, and she releases a pent-up breath. "At least they're down the other end of the hall."

Sandra and Gerry's rooms are across the corridor from one another, and as Gerry inserts his key into the lock, he says, "I found a pack of playing cards. Fancy a game?"

Sandra hesitates. She's not much of a card player. On the other hand, what the hell else is she going to do? Go back to her own room and wait for the walls to close in on her? Think about Arrington and Melanie and just how ugly life can be?

Half an hour later she slaps her cards down on the duvet and declares, "You're cheating!"

"What, because I'm winning?" he scoffs. "Sore loser."

"No one is that bloody lucky," she insists, and suddenly makes a lunge for his hand. "Show me your cards," she demands.

"Oi, I will not!" He leans back as far as he can, stretching the hand that holds his cards above his head, but she rises up on her knees. "Give over," he protests as she scrabbles for his cards, but he chuckles, and when he looks up into Sandra's face she's grinning. She's also warm and soft and her right breast is pressing against his forearm. They seem to become aware of this at the same instant and she springs back.

"Cheater," she repeats, leaning over and picking up her half-eaten lemon soufflé.

"Sore loser," he repeats perfectly calmly. "But I'm a lover, not a fighter."

"There's a difference between looking for love everlasting and looking for a quick shag," she retorts, handing over his double chocolate pudding with caramel and sea salt.

He draws back, stung. "I'm sixty years old, Sandra, not sixteen. You don't think I'd like to find someone to love, who loves me back?"

"How sweet," she replies acidly, and as she hears herself she thinks, _I really can be a bitch sometimes_. "How do I know what you want? But you're not looking very hard, are you?"

"I bloody am," he insists stubbornly, wondering if there's any possibility for him to retain a measure of dignity. The odds look slim from where he's standing. Well, sitting.

"Oh, bollocks, you are not," she mutters, but feels a little ashamed of herself.

He looks sharply at her, or at least as sharply as one can look with a mouthful of pudding. "Yeah, all right, you can't just say that and leave it 'anging. What's that supposed to mean?"

She hesitates, momentarily debating whether it might not be better to play the comment off lightly, but then she thinks, _What the hell?_ It's not every Friday night she has a fake date with Gerry Standing, and somebody needs to clue him in. "Who was it that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?"

To her surprise he still looks genuinely wounded. "Despite what you may think, I'm not just some antiquated sleaze."

Her eyebrows arch. "I never –"

"I've actually learned a few things from my mistakes, Sandra. I thought you knew that."

She considers, poking at her dessert with her spoon. She's hurt his feelings, and it gives her that sick, crawling feeling of shame she used to get back at school when she was The Mean Girl. "No, Gerry. It's what I told you the other night about the lovely, insipid, doe-eyed Leah –"

"Lee Anne."

"You keep dating the same woman. It never works out, but God forbid you should deviate from your nice, safe pattern."

"Oh, and you're doing so much better?"

She chuckles wryly. "I'm not even sure I remember the last time I went out on a date."

"Repressed memories?" he suggests. "Tonight aside, of course. So how is it you're an expert on me, then?"

"Forty hours a week for eight years," she replies immediately.

"What is it I'm getting wrong, then? Lee Anne is lovely, intelligent, kind –"

"You don't need 'kind,' Gerry, you need someone who knows when you're due a bollocking."

"I get that at work. What else?"

"Oh, I don't know – a shared interest? Similar life experience? An ability to murder the English language and a pack a day habit? A love of purple?"

He opens his mouth to protest, but then closes it. A shared appreciation of curry paste admittedly isn't the greatest foundation for a relationship. But it had possibilities.

"She sounds great, Sandra. Let me know if you bump into her," he grumps. Discussing everything he does wrong in the romance department doesn't tend to improve his mood, especially when all the demerits are being handed out by the guv'nor.

"You could start small," she suggests teasingly. "Look for someone who occasionally laughs at your stupid jokes."

"You occasionally laugh at my stupid jokes."

She looks taken aback, but then grins. "Nah, that's me laughing at _you_."

"Easy mistake," he responds nonchalantly. "I'm feeling magnanimous, however, because you owe me a pony."

"Nope." She smirks,again unbearably smug, and leisurely stretches her long legs out in front of her. She rests one bare foot atop the other and carefully takes a bite of lemon soufflé, which she savours before adding, "I don't either."

He looks at her for a long time before asking, "How's that?" He's somewhat distracted by how comfortable she looks lounging against the pillows stacked up against the headboard, taking up a good half of what's supposed to be his bed for the night. _It figures_, he thinks. _You finally got Sandra in your bed. The wish-granting genie has a malevolent sense of humour_. _You should've specified._

"You're reformed," she shoots back loftily. "No gambling."

"You're just a sore loser." He shifts his gaze from the way her black trousers cling to her legs, in search of safer territory. Bright, warm eyes – Oops, no, not safer. Pudding. Yeah, that's harmless. "Now, Sandra, not only are you my guv'nor, but you're my dear friend. You ought to know I wouldn't dream of taking your money… if you weren't such a piss-poor card player." She lobs one of those pillows at him – that's twice in one day – scattering playing cards everywhere, and he dodges. "Oi, watch the pudding!"

She laughs and leans toward him. "This is the Gerry you need to be showing to all those prospective fourth Mrs. Standings," she chides, and he does look into her eyes, which sparkle. "The real you. You can be funny and charming and pleasant to be around, you know."

He perks up. "I'm charming?" _Sandra thinks I'm charming?_

"You _can be_ charming, Gerry. You have your moments. You can also be a complete tosser." She grins at him, taking the sting out of the words in the way that only she can do. "How much time do you reckon you've wasted trying to impress your dates?"

"No offence, gov, but that's crap advice." Her lips purse in disapproval and he continues. "Women who know the real me won't date me," he points out wryly.

"How many women _know_ the real you besides your ex-wives and your daughters?" she retorts.

Gerry grows quiet and stays that way for a good half a minute before muttering, "I suppose just one."

They look at one another. Sandra is touched and flattered and pleasantly warm and a little uncomfortable, and the soufflé sticks in her throat. "Well, there you go," she says. "Introduce him to some people, and you never know what might happen. You could meet someone exciting and challenging who's just waiting to go a few rounds with Gerry Standing."

It's on the tip of his tongue to ask if she'd consider volunteering, but he hasn't completely lost his mind. "You sound like a bleedin' life coach."

"Can I try that?"

"Bein' a life coach? I wouldn't recommend it, Sandra. I don't think it would suit your particular skill set."

She snorts. "Your pudding, you dolt. How's the chocolate?"

"Yeah, go on, then; it's good."

He watches her reach over with her spoon and take a generous bite. "It is good," she agrees, lapping the last traces from the utensil, and Gerry swallows hard, watching her pink tongue and trying not to think about her proximity. Suddenly this all seems like a very bad idea. "But not as good as mine. I out-ordered you."

"You still owe me twenty-five quid."

She grins as he readjusts his position, joining her as she leans against the ornate antique headboard. "Yeah, well, you can't buy dignity."

"So you wouldn't consider leaving me with a shred, would you?"

Her expression softens in one of those lightning-fast mood changes that are so much a part of her character. "Thanks for insisting on dinner, Gerry. Tonight's been a really nice break from this awful waste of time."

He considers asking her what's bothering her so much about their current investigation, but doesn't want to dampen the playful tone. "Even at the cost of having the wait staff think you've got the bad taste to be romantically involved with me?"

"Even at that high cost."

"Come on, I'd at least be a step up from Hargreaves," he says, and okay, he's fishing.

She doesn't make a joke. "You'd be a whole flight up," she admits a little sadly.

"So would you – from Leah, I mean."

Her lips quirk at his little joke. "Lee Anne," she acknowledges softly, scooping up another carefully selected bite of the heavenly soufflé. "But you hate to climb stairs. Besides, you'd have to go for Indian food, and you'd get sick of me picking the wine and taking the piss out of your ties."

"You do all that anyway," he returns. "I'm pretty sure I could stand it. Plus it occurs to me that there might be other benefits, and I'm good with mouthy birds."

He's briefly afraid he has gone too far, but Sandra rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I secretly find you irresistible."

_If only_, he thinks. _But no; no matter what you say now, you'd have it off with a complete prat like James Hargreaves, but you wouldn't ever look twice at good old Upstanding Standing, would you?_ "It's mutual," he snaps, and is immediately mortified by the obvious bitterness lacing the words. Oh, shit, he sounds about as mature as a scorned schoolboy.

Her eyes widen and then her gaze drops to the remnants of the soufflé. The sharp retort he expects doesn't come. "You and the rest of the adult male population with an IQ above eighty," she says, not angry but instead unusually self-deprecating. "That's why I'm fifty and single."

"Forty-nine," he corrects gently, and her lips shape themselves into that one-sided smile.

"And I plan to stay that way – Forty-nine, that is." She puts her dessert plate down on the low table beside the bed and swings her feet to the floor. "And who am I kidding? Single too. It's not so bad. I'm too set in my ways to change for anyone, and who wants to come home to a frozen dinner and an obsessive detective? Like I'd want some bloke who wants to redesign the back garden and take me to lunch at his mother's. Men want the Lee Annes of the world. Who gives a toss?"

Gerry looks down at the traces of his own dessert, thinking. She sounds bitter too. Surely it's not anything to do with him, is it? Can he hope it is? "No, not all of us. Some of us date the Lee Annes because they're the ones who say yes."

"Maybe they say yes because they're the ones you ask," she volleys, stepping into her shoes and checking her pocket for her room key, and Gerry just sits very still, afraid to move a muscle until he figures out what's going on. Is Sandra not-so-subtly taking him to task for never having asked _her_?

She meets his amazed gaze and Gerry instantly returns to earth with a sharp rush that's part surge of relief, part crushing disappointment. Of course that wasn't what she meant. "Are you going to take my advice?" she asks quickly, sounding less smug than he expected, and glancing down again as she smoothes the fabric of her jumper.

"You mean and hunt up one of the Sandras of the world instead of another of the Lee Annes?"

His voice comes out as flat as a Shrove Tuesday pancake, and she winces at his terms. "I suppose, if you have to put it that way," she replies irritably.

He stands up because he doesn't like the power differential involved with her looming above him like this. He knows what he should say: Sure, gov, I'll give it a go the next time one of your lot turns up at my local Tesco. I suppose I should try the frozen foods aisle, yeah? And she'll make some smart, superior comment and go back to her own room and that will be all she wrote.

That's what he should do.

But he didn't imagine that lengthy, loaded look they'd exchanged in the lift, or the heat of her skin when they'd struggled over his playing cards. She is as aware as he is that their little craft is circumnavigating a possibility that must be very obvious to everyone else around them. On an antique map it would be marked "Here Be Dragons."

He let one opportunity pass the other night at Sandra's flat. Miraculously he has been given another. Forget what he should do; he knows what he _has_ to do, even though his blood rushes so loudly in his ears that he can barely hear himself speak – which is just as well, since his throat has gone dry and he's probably croaking like a frog.

_Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!_

"No," he says decidedly.

Sandra frowns. Jesus, but she's pretty when she's petulant. This morning he'd diverted himself by imagining her all tarted up in black leather like a covert operative in a glossy Hollywood film, but this is enough. Everyday Sandra Pullman in her trousers, simple teal top and dark cardigan, with her normally perfect hair mussed just slightly from leaning against the pillows, is more than enough. It's everything Gerry wants, and as she stands there looking irritated and puzzled and yes, a bit hurt, he admits it to himself.

_All in, Gerry, old son. _

"I couldn't do, now I've known the original for this long," he says, and as her frown turns into a bona fide scowl he realizes it has come out sounding like an insult. She takes a step, and out of pure desperation he lunges between her and the door. "No, no, Sandra. I meant – accept no substitutes," he exclaims frantically.

He wishes he could be more eloquent, but if the dawning comprehension in her eyes is anything to go by, he's at least getting his point across. He's stuck himself in it now, so he'll just have to storm on, doing the best he can with what he has. And what he has is the sort of line that could only come from the lips of a Gerry Standing.

"What if I did find somebody like you?" he forges ahead with the valor of despair. "It'd be like saying, I fancy a six-weeks' holiday in Thailand, but as I can't afford it, I'm off for the weekend to Blackpool. You just _wouldn't_, would you?"

_Would _you_, dear readers? If you're having anything like as much fun reading this as I'm having writing it, I'd be delighted if you wrote a review. Thanks for being so kind thus far._


	8. All In

_Note: Sorry for the delay, all! I've written myself into a bit of a corner and am trying to think up a way to get out. That's about the next chapter, not this one, but I don't like to post until I have the next chapter written, in case I need to go back and change something! Thanks for your patience. Warning: chapter contains obligatory Barbara Stanwyck reference. Read at your own risk._

**Chapter Eight: All In**

Gerry waits in a sort of suspended animation while very different emotions chase one another as rapidly as this morning's clouds through wide blue eyes. Surprise – that he's finally said it, or that he feels it, that he wants her enough to tell her? – relief, happiness – he's sure of that – and finally panic. Unfortunately he's sure of that too.

And then she laughs.

The laughter is forced, far from genuine, but his heart sinks. Sandra has chosen to take his admission as a joke, although she knows full well that's not how he intended it. She's chosen to retreat back behind the barricades of their nice, relatively uncomplicated working relationship.

She's chosen to reject him.

"You know you wouldn't like Thailand," she says, wondering if the false brightness of her tone is as grating as Gerry's ears as it is on hers. "Hot as hell, too many bugs, and no candy floss."

As comebacks go it's not a great one, but it will at least get her out of the room. She darts over to the bedside table, yanks up her plate and fork, and backs toward the door as she says, "The nurse promised to ring if there's any change, but I think we should be ready to head over by seven. That means no breakfast here, I'm afraid."

"You can buy me a bacon sandwich," Gerry responds weakly, still trying to decide whether he's just miserable and humiliated, or miserable, humiliated, and mad as hell.

She can't meet his eyes as she tosses off a "Night, Gerry" and beats a hasty retreat before letting him reply.

She blinks rapidly, startled by the warm yellow glow lighting her room where she had expected – and craved, just for a moment – total darkness. She registers the neatly turned back covers and the tiny plate holding a single biscuit perched on the pillow. The service here is impeccable.

Sandra squeezes her eyes shut. Her skin is flushed hot from embarrassment and defeat. What she has done will maintain the status quo; things will go along tickety-boo at UCOS. She has to protect herself, and Gerry too.

_From what?_ another voice asks her. From taking a risk, albeit a big one? From letting someone in? From reaching for something that she suspects she has half-wanted for a long time?

_Good job, Pullman_, says her brain. _When the stakes are high and the chips are down, Gerry has the bottle to go all in, and what do you do? You fold_.

Her lips form a single word, two syllables: "Coward."

It spurs her into action like hot iron. Sandra learned early on to cultivate more than a tough-girl exterior; hers is a genuine toughness. That has never stopped her from being scared, but it has taught her not to let fear govern her actions. She broke that rule once, sixteen years ago – really broke it – and she paid. And now the Arrington case is back, telling her that she paid, but not in full.

She can't change the past, but she can choose not to repeat the mistake. She thinks of Melanie Tyler. Life is brutal, and it can be short. Sandra is alive. She might as well live.

Gerry flings the door open so swiftly that Sandra's hand is still poised to knock. Her fist drops to her side and opens as she says, "I realized I was rude. I didn't ask if you wanted to try the lemon soufflé."

Have you ever seen _Double Indemnity_? Gerry has. Cold-blooded Barbara Stanwyck has already hooked oily Fred MacMurray, but she finishes him off when she turns up unexpectedly at his apartment. The excuse? "You forgot your hat." The catch? There's no hat.

Sandra isn't carrying her dessert plate. Gerry is quite sure she hasn't turned up to bewitch him into helping her off her pesky husband.

Gerry doesn't answer and they look at one another for so long that Sandra nearly loses her nerve, so she takes the situation into her own hands. She steps forward so they're toe to toe and, eyes wide open, leans in until her lips brush very lightly against his.

The contact is so brief that Gerry would think he'd imagined it if his heart wasn't pounding and his nerves tingling. Sandra draws back, her eyes still on his, and manages a tiny smile. She looks scared. He recognizes it, even though he hasn't seen it before, because he's scared too. "Come on, Gerry, don't you at least kiss your dates good night?"

His lips quirk into a tiny answering smile as they regard one another, acknowledging what this means. Bet high; win big or lose big. There are no guarantees. How will this look to either of them when they're back on the clock and both being stubborn, and she's shouting at him and he has to bite his tongue because she's the governor?

All he can think now, though, is that he wants desperately to turn this surreal evening spent in an alternate reality into _their_ reality, and her wide eyes, apprehensive and impatient and unusually soft, tell him that she wants that too. What the hell is he waiting for? He's Gerry Standing! This is his forte!

Has he _ever_ been this nervous?

Her palms are cool when she takes his face in her hands and tilts his head toward hers, bringing their mouths back together. She doesn't kiss him again, though; she just waits with their lips touching.

Gerry gets it. This is not a time for her to play fearless leader. It's a decision for both of them to make.

As far as he's concerned, the decision has already been made.

"Sandra," he says, with the incredulous inflection that makes it come out sounding more like "Really?" The first time Gerry kisses her properly, she's grinning. Her wide mouth is soft and welcoming, but it can't stop his thoughts from racing. This is wrong. This is _Sandra_. He's not supposed to be kissing Sandra. But her breath smells of lemons and sugar and, God, he really does want to taste that lemon soufflé, preferably without a fork.

She wraps her arms around him and squeezes gently. "Relax," she instructs, and no way can he resist the combined sensory assault of her low voice and the pressure of soft curves. He kisses her again, and it is a serious kiss, an end-of-the-movie-fade-to-black kiss. They're giving the kids from the lift a run for their money, and when he at last has to surface for breath or risk the massive humiliation of fainting in her arms like a Victorian maiden, he blinks, convinced for a startled half-second that the world has tilted. But no: Sandra is lying beneath him, her head resting on the self-same pillow she'd chucked at him not so long ago. He realizes his weight has her pinned to the bed and he instinctively rolls away, genuinely embarrassed when he has to remove his hand from beneath her top to do so. He's slightly aghast at his presumptuousness. She didn't invite him to maul her, after all.

"Sandra?" he asks uneasily.

"Still me," she confirms, her voice laced with warmth and humour. Before he can apologize, she forestalls him. Her own hand glides down to the hem of her jumper. "Would you like me to take this off?"

Right, then. No need to apologize.

He doesn't say anything, but the look on his face makes her grin that crooked grin, and she sits up and strips the cardigan and her top off together. She seems to be taking all of this in stride.

The message has been received, but he can't stop himself from hesitating, from asking her permission each time he touches her, each time more of her wonderful skin is revealed, and each time she patiently reassures him.

Oh, but he has to be sure – he has to be really, really sure before they officially pass the point of no return. He knows it makes him sound like a geeky sixteen-year-old, but he frantically asks, "Are you sure this is all right?"

The world tilts again and he thinks sanity has returned and she has decided that no, this is not all right. But she has only reversed their positions, and he has to look up into her eyes as she says, finally exasperated, "Look, as soon as something happens that's not all right, you'll be the first to know."

The wish-granting genie proves to be less malevolent than Gerry had previously been led to suspect, and he experiences the giddy sensation of falling asleep with Sandra Pullman sprawled next to him, taking up more than her fair share of the bed.

When he wakes, the first thing his eyes land on is the clock, which grimly informs him that it's 7:05. Shit. Sandra is going to be well and truly hacked off.

_Sandra_. Where is Sandra? He sits up and looks around the room, but he doesn't really need visual confirmation. He can feel her absence. She's hardly likely to be hiding under the bed. Gerry instantly goes hot and cold with panic, which quickly subsides into deep depression.

_Maybe she's just gone back to her room to get ready_, he tries to convince himself, but the thought rings hollow. If that were the case, she would've woken him and told him to get his lazy arse in gear.

No, Sandra has come to her senses. He has gambled and lost, and off to Blackpool he goes. Now, there's a thought. He might as well go there literally, because she's certainly not going to want him hanging around UCOS, cluttering up the place.

The door opens and there she stands, looking even more grim and miserable than he had feared, and something inside him shatters. Instinctively he slides back under the covers, yanking the duvet up to his chin.

Sandra doesn't seem to notice. "You might as well go back to sleep," she announces unhappily.

"What? No." He sits up again. This is no time for false modesty. He has to show her that they can pretend this never happened and go on working together. "I'll grab a shower and be ready in ten minutes. Then we'll go try to question Melanie."

"That'd be a neat trick." Sandra allows the door to close behind her and she takes a few steps forward, and as she does Gerry really looks at her. Her hair is neatly combed, but she's not dressed for the day either, unless she plans to venture out onto the streets of York barefooted and clad in a hotel-issue white terry-cloth robe. She stops at the foot of the bed.

"Melanie Tyler died at 5:30 this morning without regaining consciousness."

Gerry stares at Sandra as he processes this.

"So you might as well go back to sleep," she reiterates. "There's no reason for us not to stay for breakfast."

She sounds utterly defeated, but she doesn't seem to be scrambling to put more distance between them, so Gerry swallows hard and takes another risk. He lifts the covers on the other side of the bed. "C'mere."

And she does, terry cloth and all. She lets him take her in his arms and she finds a way for her silky head to rest against his shoulder, and Gerry hopes she won't ask why his heart is pounding so wildly.

She wasn't running away from him.

Gerry feels horrible and selfish and ignoble, because he's relieved. He's sorry that a woman is dead, but he's so relieved that Sandra hasn't changed her mind. He strokes her cloth-covered hip and presses his lips to her hair.

They both sleep – or at least he does, and assumes she does – and the next thing he knows the sun is much stronger and a voice is ringing out: "Housekeeping."

"What the hell?" It's not the most creative response, but Gerry's faculties are still half asleep.

"I knocked," the housekeeper murmurs unobtrusively.

"Yeah, well, we were asleep, weren't we?"

Sandra sits up, smoothes her hair, and offers a gracious smile. "It's no problem."

"I'll come back later," responds the housekeeper, who must have been in this situation dozens of times before. Good for her, Gerry thinks. He hasn't. Not with _Sandra_.

_Sandra_. He still doesn't think his brain has really registered it.

The woman in question is getting up, readjusting her robe. She glances at Gerry. "Breakfast," she announces. "I'll see you downstairs."

It's only once she's back in her own room that she realizes she has to return to Gerry's and collect her scattered clothing, because she has nothing else to wear. Fortunately, by the time she re-enters she hears the reassuring cascade of water from the shower.

She mentally groans at herself. _Right, Sandra; fine time to go all modest_.

She showers, dresses, combs her hair, puts her make-up on and phones Jack, who doesn't answer. He's probably out playing golf. If the weather in London is anything like the weather here, it's a fine morning, unusually warm for this time of year.

Gerry is waiting for her, drinking coffee, and he's jumpy enough to make her wonder briefly how many cups he's already gone through.

_Oh, because_ _you're not nervous at all, are you? Pull the other one, Detective Superintendent_.

"Hi," she says, because she doesn't know what else to say, and turns her delicate china cup up. It's pretty, pure white with tiny blue-purple flowers on the handle and rim. Forget-me-nots, maybe. Grace would know. Then she looks up and finds Gerry's gaze intently focused on her, and for some reason she laughs, and he laughs, and then everything is – almost fine.

She is eating her strawberry waffle when he says, "Maybe it won't really matter," and she freezes with her fork poised in mid-air and fixes him with wide, startled eyes. Gerry feels like a fool, but she's the one who turns bright pink when he gently says, "That we didn't get Melanie to reconfirm her testimony. Maybe it won't make any difference to Arrington and his brief."

"Yeah," she says half-heartedly. She believes this even less than Gerry does, but what can they do about it until Monday? Sandra's eyes fall back to her plate. The thought lends a certain "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die" cast to all of this. She's feeling unusually fatalistic.

Sandra beats Gerry back downstairs, and when she asks for the bill, the smiling receptionist hands it over and asks, "On the card you gave yesterday?"

"Yes, please," says Gerry from over Sandra's shoulder, quickly lifting the bill from between her manicured fingernails, but not before she's seen the total. Her eyes bug.

"Christ, Gerry, you'll never get reimbursed for a fraction of that," she hisses as discreetly as possible, appalled. "You said the rate was reasonable!"

He shrugs, avoiding her gaze. "Yeah, for what it is. I thought it was quite nice. Didn't you think it was quite nice?" he mumbles as he scrawls his name with a flourish.

She scowls at him.

"Come on," he instructs, lightly taking her elbow and leading her out into the late-morning sunlight. "Don't make a scene, gov."

"You did this on purpose," she says, her tone accusatory, as she turns toward where she'd parked her car the day before, only to realize that of course it isn't there, because Gerry moved it when he went into town. She wheels around, frowning.

Gerry doesn't look any too pleased himself. "I did _what_ on purpose?" he demands, and she realizes how her statement must have sounded in light of… recent events.

"Laid out a load of wedge," she clarifies more gently in his vocabulary.

"I didn't do it by accident," he replies, and they start walking again. "I sort of figured we'd both be a hell of a lot more comfortable here than at the sodding Travel Lodge."

He did it primarily for her, because she's been so tightly wound. Gerry just wanted to do something nice for her. Sandra knows this and feels a little ashamed of her behavior, ashamed that it inspired him to do this extravagant thing. But she is pleased too, and as they settle into the car she says, "And just think, Gerry, you could've saved half that money."

He grins. "Would've been worth it at twice the price," he replies breezily, and then turns horrified, as if someone has flipped a switch, when he realizes what he's said. "I didn't mean –"

But she bursts into laughter. "And here I was just hoping I'd worked off that twenty-five quid," she teases, and she's relieved they can talk about it.

"Welsher," he retorts, and leans back contentedly as Sandra cranks the car and points it south. They're not going to pretend it never happened, then. That, at least, is a relief. Not that that isn't her style, or his – but it doesn't seem as if it should be _their_ style. Not for the two of them, after all this time. He looks over at the gov. Her hair shimmers, and he feels rather smug because now he knows what it feels like between his fingers. He knows what her skin tastes like stripped bare of soap and perfume. He knows that her face is pale, her skin clear, in the morning light.

_Yeah_, he thinks. _That happened_.

They are quiet on the drive. Not silent, but quiet. It is a fairly comfortable, companionable quietness until they are in London itself and headed toward the Met so Gerry can retrieve the Stag. Gerry's pretty damn sure that it's not only on his side of the car that the tension has been ratcheted up several notches.

What now? Gerry looks over at Sandra, and catches her looking back. Do they leave it until Monday? His gut says no. He doesn't want the next time he sees her to be over the tea kettle, with Jack sat reading the _Telegraph_ and Brian going on about the documentary he and Esther watched on telly Sunday night.

He takes a deep breath as subtly as possible, but before he can speak Sandra says, "I don't want this to be awkward. It doesn't have to be."

"No." It doesn't take as much courage as he'd thought to reach across the gear shift and smooth her already smooth hair. It feels natural, instinctual. "But what –" He breaks off. Before he even speaks them the words sound foolish.

"What does it mean?" She grins, but her eyes are sympathetic, sharing his plight. "I don't know. We slept together and the sky didn't fall. That seems encouraging."

Her words encourage him, anyway. "Come home with me," he invites impetuously, and watches her expression change. She looks startled, then hesitant, and finally regretful, and Gerry knows what her answer is going to be before she says it. She has that "I don't want to hurt your feelings" expression that women get. So the sound of the word "No" isn't itself much of a surprise.

"Figured it wouldn't hurt to ask," he says, sounding much more glib than he feels.

She bites her lip. "It's not that I don't want to, but –"

He forces a smile. "Don't worry about it," he says from the safety of his false bravado as he swings his door open. "I'll see you Monday."

He moves so quickly that he's already got the driver's side door unlocked when she calls, "Gerry, wait," and he looks to see her leaning toward him across the gear shift. "I want to take another shower," she says. "I want to change clothes. I want to brush my teeth with my own toothbrush. But I could come by later, if –" She finishes the sentence with a one-shouldered shrug.

_Play it cool, Gerald. Don't make a total fool of yourself_. "I'll make dinner."

"I'll bring wine," she replies, and then he'd swear she actually looks a little flustered as she flashes him a quick smile and hastily heads toward the exit.

_A date_, Gerry thinks, smiling slightly to himself. _I just made a date with Sandra._

At the exit, Sandra grips the steering wheel tightly as she waits for a break in the traffic. _A date_, she thinks, and a tingle of panic races down her spine. _Oh, Christ on crutches, I have a _date_ with _Gerry.


	9. Getting to Know You

**Chapter Nine: Getting to Know You**

The three semi-retired detectives are frozen in various postures – Brian at his desk, fingertips poised above his keyboard; Gerry near the kettle, holding two steaming mugs of tea; Jack just inside the entrance, hands on his hips – gaping in stunned silence at the open doorway through which Sandra has just disappeared.

"Oh, no," Jack says in a low, steely voice, again the chief super. "I'm not having this." With that he strides off in the direction in which Sandra has stormed, Gerry on his heels and Brian bringing up the rear.

"Jack – wait a minute, mate." Gerry grabs the older man's arm. "Don't you think it might be better to let her cool off a little first?"

"No. I'm getting to the bottom of this right now. She's being wildly unprofessional, and if she doesn't think I'll go to Strickland, she doesn't know me as well as she thinks." The second sentence, despite the third-person pronouns, is addressed to Sandra herself, or at least to her back. Some might consider storming into the women's washroom to be a bit unprofessional too, but that's just what Jack has done, the other two in his wake.

Sandra stands at the sink, her eyes meeting Jack's in their reflected image, just as Caitlin Standing had done last week, but now the roles are reversed. (Was that only a week ago? It feels like half a lifetime. Yet nothing can put enough distance between Sandra and the autumn of 1995. Funny, isn't it, how time can be so unpredictable?)

Jack is gazing steadily at her, rigid with anger and determination. Brian darts sideways glances in her direction, afraid to meet her eyes full-on. And Gerry – well, she has no idea, because she can't look at Gerry.

She'd gotten a glimpse of him as she stormed out of the office. He'd looked completely horrified.

Understandably. This has not been Sandra's finest hour, and she can hardly blame it on a case of the Mondays, can she?

Just over thirty-six hours ago she'd been knocking at Gerry's door, insisting to herself that those weren't butterflies fluttering furiously around her stomach. Whatever they were – not nerves, of course – she wasn't not going to be able to eat the meal Gerry had prepared unless they eased up. She glanced down at her knee-length skirt and fleetingly wished she'd worn jeans instead. What the hell was she doing, trying to impress him? Gerry saw her five days a week, at least.

But this was a date. You didn't show up in jeans for a first date, not when you were fifty.

Forty-nine, insisted another voice, as he opened the door.

"Hi," he said, his features creased in a slight smile.

"Hi." She held out two bottles. "I wasn't sure, so I brought red and white."

"Thanks." He looked down out of habit and added, "Oh, this is a nice shiraz. Have you had it before?"

"No," she admitted, and shifted her weight awkwardly.

"Take your coat?"

As he slipped the lightweight garment from her shoulders and hung it up, the not-butterflies worked themselves into a frenzy. Christ, this was weird.

"Have a seat," he invited. "I'll open the wine." She didn't think it was only her imagination telling her he looked rather eager to return to the safety of the kitchen. She longed to go with him, to stand around casually as she had done dozens of times before and shoot the shit, to drive him crazy peering into the oven or poking into the pots and pans on the stove. This would be so much more natural with Jack Standing next to her, impatiently asking when the dinner would be ready.

Except, of course, she wouldn't want Jack chaperoning a date.

A date. With Gerry. Sandra was so uncomfortable that she actually shivered. She couldn't determine whether she was relieved or on the verge of a panic attack when Gerry eventually returned with the open bottle and two glasses.

She sank awkwardly onto the sofa. Awkward: that was the watch-word of the evening. Odd how she'd never noticed the cushions being too soft before – but that was probably because she habitually sprawled back, uncaring, not trying to perch upright on the edge and cross her legs at a flattering angle.

"You look nice," he said, and she murmured an acknowledgement, thinking, Well, we're following the script. The date script. Gerry the Date. Sandra the Date.

_Shit._

They were supposed to talk about music next, or film – something innocuous. Not politics or religion. Certainly not serial rapists-cum-murderers.

Sandra looked down at her rich red wine, mentally envisioning herself joining the long column of Women Gerry Standing Has Dated.

Sandra hated queues.

There was a corresponding file on her side of the room: Men Sandra Pullman Has – well, dated isn't precisely right. Shagged, then.

Oh, Jesus and all the saints, what had she and Gerry gotten themselves into? Sandra knew she wasn't the only one wondering, because Gerry was studiously avoiding her gaze. She realized she didn't want Gerry to join the queue on her side of the aisle any more than she wanted to join his.

This was supposed to be different. It wasn't supposed to go like this between the two of them: thousandth verse, same as the first.

I can't do this, she thought, but the knowledge didn't forestall the flood of bitter disappointment that rushed through her when he managed a woeful grin and said, "This was a terrible idea, wasn't it?"

She drank a bit of the wine to moisten her lips. "Yeah," she admitted roughly, forcing her own ghost of a grin. She felt like a fist was squeezing her stomach, squishing it like a balloon. "Awful. If you breathe a word of this to the boys –"

"I'm humiliated enough with just the two of us knowin' about it."

At least their eyes finally met. Gerry looked as miserable as she felt, which provided a certain kind of comfort. There was no reason to prolong the agony. Sandra set her glass aside and got to her feet. "I think I should go."

"Ah, yeah, probably." Gerry stood likewise and glanced down at his shoes, then back up at her. His sapphire eyes were unusually shadowed. "I suppose I'm a Blackpool punter after all."

She managed not to wince. "Well," she said, "we gave it a go, at least. Is this a new record for least successful date?"

"Shortest, maybe." He was accompanying her to the door, retrieving her jacket from the closet. "We didn't even make it to the dinner."

Something suddenly struck Sandra. "What is for dinner?" she asked, figuring she might as well find out what she was missing. "I don't smell anything."

Gerry took a deep breath and blew it out, jamming his hands into his trouser pockets, and cast her a sheepish look. "Nothing," he admitted, and was he blushing? "I, ah, I didn't cook anything."

Her sandy eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. "I'm stunned, Gerry. Isn't that part of the standard treatment? Wine 'em, dine 'em –"

"Yeah, exactly," he interrupted. "I had no idea what to make for you."

Sandra stopped with her hand on the door knob. "Why?" she asked sharply.

Gerry sighed. "Because you're you, Sandra." He reached out and touched her jaw, allowing himself to do it just one more time. "Not some bird I met at the supermarket or the dry-cleaner's. You're – Sandra."

"I am," she said softly, and allowed herself a hesitant, hopeful smile. "I think we're a pair of idiots, Gerald."

"Are we?" He hadn't drawn his hand back, but was brushing his fingertips softly over her skin. That skin –

"Yeah, and I'm too thick to take my own bloody advice. What was it I told you last night about doing the same things over and over and expecting different results?"

He looked at her for a long moment and then actually smiled, albeit tentatively. "You mean you think we should try something different?"

"We could spend a while attempting to make small talk, if you want. We've only known each other for nine years." The confident, take-no-prisoners Sandra Gerry knew was back, smirking at him.

"Or?" His hands seemed to have a mind of their own, fingers combing through her hair, but she wasn't slapping him, so why stop?

"I bet we could think of something."

"What about dinner?"

She flashed that radiant smile just for him. "Fancy a pizza?"

They had eaten pizza, eventually, with pepperoni and black olives and the rest of the wine, and they had sprawled all over Gerry's not-too-soft sofa and bickered about all sorts of inconsequential things. When he asked, "You want to stay?" she answered, "I might as well," and it was that simple.

He'd spent all day Sunday waiting for the dreaded moment when she'd get tired of lounging in his living room, reading while he did laundry, sneering at the politics of the _Mail_, and announce her imminent departure – and, wonder of wonders, it never came. The Sandra he'd expected, the one who thrived on personal space and solitude, had stayed out of sight, and this other Sandra had tumbled blearily out of Gerry's bed at 6:30 this morning to go home and get ready for work.

9:08 a.m., Monday morning: enter the detective superintendent stage left.

Lorelai Arrington had saved them traipsing around the city in search of her by obligingly turning up twenty minutes later, this time with an official visitor's pass. "Mr. Lane," she greeted Brian enthusiastically, "and Mr. Standing. Where's Mr. Halford?"

Jack presented himself, emerging from Sandra's office with her following.

"And Detective Superintendent Pullman," the young woman continued with a bright smile. "I just came to thank you for all you've done for my father."

A muscle in Sandra's firm jaw twitched. "We don't really have time for social calls," she said brusquely. "We're working."

"We'll let you know if there's any news," Brian added more mildly, eager to get Lorelai out the door before she was engulfed by the Wrath of Sandra.

"Oh, but there is news." Lorelai hitched her messenger bag up higher on her shoulder. "You haven't heard? My dad's going to be a free man."

That muscle in Sandra's jaw twitched again, and Lorelai should've had the sense to be scared, but she looked undaunted. "I highly doubt that."

"No," Lorelai insisted, "his attorney filed the appeal today. And it's all down to you."

"The hell it is," Sandra snapped before any of the others could speak, and Gerry and Brian exchanged wide-eyed looks of astonishment. "Over my dead body will UCOS furnish the excuse for a rapist and murderer like Raymond Arrington to walk free!"

"I thought you were looking for the truth," Lorelai contested hotly, her eyes narrowing.

"That _is _the truth, love," Sandra retorted pitilessly.

"We're still looking into your claim that your father is innocent," Brian interceded, blushing slightly as he attempted to mollify the young woman and make up for Sandra's unwonted explosion of temper.

"What Mr. Lane means is that we're looking into all aspects of the case," Jack interrupted in the stern voice that brooked no disagreement. It was the voice that had reined in the officers under his command for forty years, and Sandra's spine stiffened when she heard it. "All aspects," he repeated pointedly. "Including the possibility that your father is, as you say, an innocent man."

Sandra ignored Jack and focused on Lorelai. "You infatuated child," she said, in a tone of contempt mingled with pity. Sandra glanced toward Gerry. "Get her out of here," she bit out. "We have work to do. And you're all out of your minds if you think I'm going to let this little girl tell me how to run this investigation."

That was when Sandra had sailed out, the doors banging together behind her. Lorelai had sent the three men a look of complete disgust. "Forget it," she muttered when Brian approached her. "I should've known. You lot are all the same."

Now Sandra wheels around, confronting her three colleagues. Her eyes still flash lightning, but she protectively folds her arms across her stomach. "You think Arrington's as pure as the driven snow?" she demands quietly, rhetorically. Her gaze skips from man to man. "Fine, then. You prove it."

She has to step around Jack to get out into the hallway, but she doesn't let that stop her. Gerry's first instinct has him starting after her, but then he turns back. He doesn't know this Sandra, and he has no idea what he'd say to her if he caught up with her. Brian stares morosely at her shoes. Jack is looking after Sandra, his body still rigid with anger, but a generous measure of what is undeniably worry mingling in his bright eyes. After a long moment he clears his throat.

"Right, lads. There's work to do."

Brian bites his lip. "What about Sandra?" he asks uneasily.

Jack shrugs. "It wouldn't do any good to go after her now. She'll be back. Have you ever known Sandra to miss a full day of work?"

Gerry follows them silently, with his head bowed and his hands shoved into his pockets. He hopes Jack is right – but somehow, he doesn't think he is. Not this time.


	10. Need to Know

_**Author's notes: Warning: no laughs herein. No warm fuzzies.**__ This is the chapter that makes the whole story hang together, so obviously I think it's important, but if you're easily distressed, you could just skip it, and you'll get the gist in chapter eleven. **Some people might even think this chapter deserves an M rating**; obviously I disagree. I assume most of you know what's coming anyway. **You've been warned.**_

_One more thing: I know there are some discrepancies from chapter to chapter as far as things like dating and number of victims, and with the way the site works, it's a huge pain to go back and try to fix them, so for now I'm going to ask you to go with the flow. Over the next few weeks I plan to post a pristine version on my own humble blog, so you'll eventually be able to find that there if you're so inclined._

_And finally: thanks a lot, real _New Tricks_ writers, because now I have to ask my gentle readers to assume that Sandra's checkered past includes two married D.I.'s named James. Brilliant._

**Chapter Ten: Need to Know**

As far as he can tell, the lights are off in her flat. He hesitates before knocking, recognizing the darkness as the equivalent to a 'do not disturb' sign, but he is already here, standing on her doorstep, and he's – not worried, exactly. Vaguely uneasy. He had never seen Sandra explode the way she had this morning, and he'd certainly never seen her storm out of the office at 9:30 a.m. Gerry, Jack, and Brian didn't catch a glimpse of her for the remainder of the day, not so much as a spiked heel or a blur of black cloth. Her mobile is still going straight to voicemail.

He has barely touched the door when it opens and he finds himself nearly nose to nose with Sandra, who blinks in surprise. She's wearing a khaki-coloured jacket over her dark top, her bag is slung over one shoulder, and her right hand grips her keys. "Gerry," she says flatly, his unexpected appearance leeching all inflection from her voice.

"I won't keep you if you're going out."

"It's not a problem." She steps aside so he can enter if he chooses. "So you're still speaking to me, then."

He chooses. "It'd give you too much of a thrill if I quit," he says lightly as he steps around her into the cool white hallway. She switches on the lamp, drops her bag and keys, and slips her jacket off while he watches.

"Your mobile's switched off, you know. I figured maybe you could use a friendly face."

She smiles faintly. She looks absolutely knackered, pale with fatigue and stress.

"If you have plans –"

"I don't." As he gestures toward her jacket and bag she admits, "I was about to go looking for a friendly face, as a matter of fact."

"Whose?" he asks without thinking, knowing he's prying.

"Yours."

He looks pleased, so she doesn't divulge that she's been standing in the darkened entryway for twenty minutes, agonizing over the decision of whether to go or stay. She doesn't want to talk, but she doesn't want to be left to her own devices, her own silence, either.

Now that he is here, the choice has been made for her. She craves the companionship, and she has only been postponing the inevitable. He'll find out soon enough anyway. So will Brian and Jack, but Gerry deserves to be told now, tonight.

"Buy you a drink?"

It sounds like a wonderful idea. After a drink or two will still be in plenty of time.

Sandra is quiet and seems almost jittery, but she makes no objection when Gerry reaches over from his barstool and squeezes her shoulder. If anything she leans slightly into his touch, which is enormously encouraging. After the better part of seventy-two hours she's not sick of him. There's a large G&T in front of her, between her elbows. She deserves it.

"Hey," Gerry says softly, and she lifts those brilliant blue eyes to his. They are clouded with some emotion he can't decipher, one he doesn't usually see between the hours of nine to five.

She finds a ghost of a smile for him. "Hey, yourself," she responds equally softly.

"You okay, Sandra?"

She sighs heavily and brings her fingertips up to rub at her gritty, irritated eyes. She hadn't slept well the night before, and not because she was in an unfamiliar bed. "Yeah, I will be."

"What is it about this one?"

The answer comes immediately. "Ray Arrington is a sick bastard, and he's guilty as hell. He has to be."

It occurs to Gerry now that she hadn't said a word about the investigation between Saturday morning and this morning. That had to be some kind of record for obsessive, single-minded Sandra.

"If that son of a bitch manages to get his conviction overturned –"

She is gripping her glass so tightly that her knuckles have gone white. "He won't," Gerry says confidently, although he can no more promise the outcome she wants than Sandra herself can. She acknowledges his effort, though, with a wry smile and the loosening of her death grip.

"He can't," Sandra says tersely, and then shakes her head. "You must think I'm a bloody lunatic."

"I think you're… too invested in this one, emotionally, and you need to step back."

She swallows hard and her eyes don't meet his, but she stays calm. "Too invested," she repeats tonelessly. "Yeah." With a sudden motion she gulps down the rest of her drink and shoves her glass across the bar. "Another," she informs the bartender.

"Sandra," Gerry begins, and then stops. They've had two really tough cases in a row. If she needs to get thoroughly pissed and blow off some steam, that's her prerogative. She still doesn't look at him, and they remain silent as she goes to work on the second drink.

"There was a lot going on for me back then," she says suddenly. "In '95. It was… not a very good time for me. I was seeing James – who was married, you know; another married one – and working insane hours to prove myself to Jane Tennison in AMIP. And Arrington – Arrington, Gerry – " She breaks off and takes a quick drink.

"Brings it all back, does it?" He won't pry; he won't ask questions. He'll just sit by her and rub her neck, where the fibers are so rigid with tension that they feel more like bone than muscle. If this has to do with Hargreaves, Gerry's not so sure he wants to know anyway.

Sandra chuckles humorlessly. "You could say that."

He suggests they order food, and she hesitates only briefly before she agrees. She is so quiet as she pokes at her grilled salmon that he begins to worry that his presence is a burden. Perhaps she would breathe more freely alone.

"If you want me to go, just say," he invites without preamble, and she raises startled eyes from her plate.

"Yeah, Gerry, that's why I was coming looking for you: because I want to be alone," she snaps irritably, and then drops her fork to her plate with a clatter and sighs. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

"'S okay. You had a rough day."

"I don't mean to take it out on you, Gerry. Honestly I don't. I – I need you on my side on this one."

He is quiet for a moment, unsure how to respond. "We're all on your side, gov."

"Jack isn't," she replies tautly. "Brian isn't." She needs Gerry firmly in her corner. The time has come to rip the plaster off, to explain it to him and get it over with. "Gerry –"

"Hey, let's talk about something else," he interrupts lightly, signaling for the bill. "Em dropped by today lookin' for you. She seemed better."

"Yeah?" she responds vaguely after a pause that she knows is too long. "That's good." It's so tempting to acquiesce. _Yeah, Gerry, let's talk about something else and forget this nightmare case for a while – just for a little while, just until tomorrow._

Twenty-four hours ago things were good, as good as they could possibly be considering the maelstrom swirling inside her mind. She's hesitant to meet his gaze for fear that he'll see it there, looking at him from behind her eyes, but when she looks up he only smiles gently at her. He looks concerned.

It had been a good weekend. She reveled in the sensation of being wrapped in his arms, strangely easy after so many years, after so many second and third and thirtieth thoughts. That's what she wants now, not to think about this but to feel. What could it hurt? What difference will a few more hours make?

"Sandra?"

"Are you ready to go?"

When he pulls up outside her flat she says "Come in" and doesn't wait for a response. It doesn't really sound like a request, not that he planned to decline.

The Sandra awaiting him just inside her door is the one he's been expecting since Friday, the aggressive, competitive woman who refuses to lose. _This isn't a contest_, he wants to tell her, but he would have to tear his mouth away from hers to do that so it seems like a stupid idea. She presses him against the pure white wall, urgent, already tugging at superfluous clothing, and he says only, "Sandra."

"I don't want to talk," she returns immediately, grabbing his arm and tugging him down the hallway.

He goes willingly. _All right,_ he thinks. It can be a contest if she wants it to be, because they're both going to win.

2.

Gerry is at his desk when Sandra enters. Brian is writing on the white board, and Jack is making tea. Brian and Jack still immediately. "Morning," Gerry murmurs to ease the transition, and she glances at him, her expression unreadable.

"Come sit down," she instructs all three of them, and they join her at the table. Jack in particular looks long at the top of her bowed head before he sits on her right. Angry as he was yesterday, as he still is, and as sure as he is that he was right and she was wrong, it pains him to see the shadows under her eyes and the grim line of her mouth. That mouth is meant to smile.

"I owe you all an apology for my behavior yesterday," she begins, sounding subdued, almost oppressed. "It was completely inappropriate and unprofessional." She glances down at the manila folder she grips tightly between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand before continuing. "No matter how I may feel personally about Raymond Arrington, what I want from you three is what I always want: to help me find the truth."

"We know that, Sandra," Jack assures her, meeting her eyes with his keen light ones. "This isn't the first time one of us has gotten too close to a case."

"That's what Gerry said, that I was too involved emotionally." As she says his name she spares him a glance. If Jack and Brian are at all surprised that she has spoken to Gerry since her dramatic exit yesterday, they don't show it. "I know he was speaking for all of you – and you're right. But I need you to understand that I have my reasons."

"You spent five months on this investigation," Brian comments, his eyebrows drawing together in sympathy. "That's reason enough, Sandra. We've all been there."

"Arrington's a nasty piece of work," Jack adds.

"He is. And he's clever." Sandra lays the folder down and links her fingers together. _Here's the church and here's the steeple_. "It took us five months to catch him – five months, six lives, and we'll never know how many women he attacked besides."

"The case file says your lot concluded he was escalating," Gerry puts in, and she nods.

"The taste for killing was new, but as a rapist he was an expert. He was incredibly careful down to the last detail. And practice makes perfect."

Despite the fact that this is neither surprising nor new information, it is sobering. "Arrington spent at least a month stalking each potential victim, learning her habits, her routine. Tennison was sure he always had two on the go simultaneously." Sandra steadily looks from man to man. "I think the reason he bottled it with Melanie Tyler and allowed himself to be caught was that he hadn't finished his… research."

Brian considers. "That would make sense," he agrees.

"You mean you think Melanie was meant to be victim number seven, rather than number six?" Jack clarifies slowly, and the superintendent nods.

"Then what made him change his plans?" Gerry asks logically.

"A change in the habits of the original number six," Brian suggests. "She got a different job, moved away, moved in with her boyfriend – anything that could cause her not to fit the profile. It could even be some minor detail that would seem insignificant to anyone else: she got a pet, joined a gym."

Sandra shakes her head a single time. "It's even simpler than that, really. She fought back hard enough that he couldn't finish her, so he wasn't satisfied and had to go after Melanie."

Gerry frowns. "Wait. You're saying that there definitely was a sixth victim before Melanie?"

"There's nothing about that in the file," Brian jumps in indignantly.

"Because there was no proof that it was Arrington. He didn't use the taser, so it was more personal and physical than his previous assaults; but he wore a stocking cap, so she never saw his face, and there wasn't a shred of physical evidence." As she speaks, Sandra opens the envelope and turns to face the white board. She efficiently clips up a close-up of a woman's neck encircled with lurid bruises in the tell-tale pattern of grasping fingers. "There was absolutely no proof," she reiterates. "She had certainly been raped, but the identity of the attacker was anyone's guess." The next image displays a knife wound high on a female thigh, nasty-looking but shallow, ineffectual. There is a torn blouse, ripped trousers, all neatly documented. Sandra lines them up next to one another with military precision.

"Why are you so sure this was Arrington and not another assailant altogether?" Jack asks in a low voice.

Bruised thighs, scraped knees. "The choice of victim would have been too coincidental. She fit Arrington's profile perfectly: single, very successful in her career, lived alone, no real boyfriend – or girlfriend – and not much of a social life to speak of. And he attacked her in a deserted area when she was leaving work," Sandra explains steadily, looking from Jack to Brian and back. "She was meant to be Arrington's grand coup, his 'fuck you' to the Met and to the world."

"Why?" Gerry hears himself ask, and is surprised to hear that his voice sounds so normal. His flesh is crawling and he feels nauseated, hot bile already rising in his throat along with the crumpets he'd toasted for both of them at breakfast, and he awaits confirmation while he pleads for denial. _No. Please, no no no._

Sandra doesn't meet his gaze, but continues to survey the photographs dispassionately. "Because," she replies evenly, simply, "she was me."

_One more note: I was nervous about this chapter, especially since I love Sandra more than one should love a fictional character. Let me know how I'm doing._


	11. Old Acquaintances

**Chapter Eleven: Old Acquaintances**

When the security doors clank into place behind them – a sound Brian always finds ominous – Sandra finally turns and speaks to him. "Ready?"

"I'm ready if you're ready, Sandra."

In the car on the way here her eyes had been hidden by those enormous sunglasses she favours. Now, looking into their blue depths, Brian feels a swell of relief because he sees nothing but the intelligence and iron-clad determination he's grown accustomed to seeing when he meets her direct gaze. She slightly inclines her chin, almost petulant. "I'm ready."

They haven't discussed the bombshell she dropped before sweeping him out of the office with her. Brian knows she chose to bring him instead of one of the others precisely because she doesn't want to discuss it, and he has obliged with equal parts relief and trepidation. He can't think about those photos, or about what Arrington – or someone – did to their Sandra, not when he's about to talk to the man face-to-face. His flawless memory will have ample time to torment him with the details later.

"You're going to lead the interview," she says now, snapping Brian back to the present. "You think he may be an innocent man, so offer him a bit of sympathy."

"Sandra –"

"Be the good cop, Brian. I'm much better at bad cop."

By reminding him of his awkward position, Sandra has done much to remove the awkwardness, and Brian offers her a grateful nod. Someone did something horrible to his friend, and Sandra is convinced that someone was Raymond Arrington. Brian certainly understands that. But, unpleasant as the possibility is, it doesn't necessarily follow that she's right. Brian thinks of the painfully thin young woman with huge chocolate eyes and hears her words: "He's my father. I know my father."

Sandra precedes him into the dingy interview room, and he has just settled himself beside her at the scarred metal table when a guard brings Arrington in. Brian takes a long, sharp look at the man. At forty-two, Arrington bears only a faint resemblance to his mug shots. Years in prison have turned him into a lean, spare version of himself, but Brian can see at a glance that the body under the shapeless uniform is hard with muscle, not an extra ounce of flesh on it. His head is clean-shaven, but the hint of a goatee darkens his chin. He turns familiar brown eyes on Sandra.

"Why, Detective Inspector," he says with mocking pleasure in a voice that immediately betrays his expensive public-school education. As Brian knows, Arrington is no street thug. "Oh, I'm sorry. It's Detective Superintendent now. I do try to keep up, even in this abominable place. My congratulations. You're looking well."

Sandra tilts her head. "Ray," she returns expressionlessly. "I'd ask what you've been up to in all this time, but I already know."

Arrington smiles as if thoroughly amused. "Sadly, my pleasures are few. Life here is… austere."

"We know all about your pleasures," Sandra retorts dismissively.

"Do you? Books are my best friends. Do you read much, Superintendent? Are you going to introduce me to your colleague? He looks like a reader."

"Brian Lane," he introduces himself, feeling like a spectator at Wimbledon.

"You are a reader, aren't you? I've devoted myself exclusively to the law during the last several years, but I prefer the classics."

"Is that where your daughter gets her love of literature? She's doing a course in English at the university."

"Yes, you've met my brilliant daughter. Her mother did her best to eradicate my influence from Lorelai's life, but blood will out."

"Lorelai is convinced of your innocence."

"She's a good girl," Arrington returns complacently. "Perceptive. Wise beyond her years, if you'll forgive a hackneyed phrase."

"Convincing your daughter that you're not a vicious animal isn't going to do much to get you out of that concrete cell," Sandra interjects flatly. "You'll also need to convince the CPS."

"I assume that's why you're here, Detective Superintendent. As I said, my jailers have to let me read the papers. The quality of the writing is dreadful, but occasionally one stumbles upon a gem."

"Such as?"

"Well, this messy murder inquiry, certainly. And the sad passing of Melanie Tyler."

"I didn't expect you to waste any time."

"After fifteen years of my life have already been stolen from me? Hardly. My attorney, Ronald Mullins, is an excellent man. I don't believe you've had the pleasure yet. He wanted to be here today, of course, but I told him it was unnecessary. Just renewing an old acquaintance."

Sandra regards Arrington unmoved. After a moment Brian resumes the thread of conversation. "Well, as we've only just met, you'll for give me for retreading familiar ground. Are you innocent, Ray?"

Arrington leans forward. "Brian – may I call you Brian? – no one is innocent. But did I commit those horrible crimes? Of course not."

Sandra remains quiet whilst Arrington recounts his version of events at Brian's prompting. Her eyes never deviate from the prisoner's. It's the same tale she knows so well she could recite it herself, of police persecution and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tennison comes in for the lion's share of the blame.

"Jane Tennison," Arrington interrupts herself. "Shame about what happened to her."

"What did happen?" Sandra asks evenly.

"The drinking, the allegations of professional misconduct. I could see it coming even back then. A woman with nothing in her life other than an all-consuming devotion to her career – that can be dangerous, Detective Superintendent."

Sandra can't hide her disgust as she swings herself to her feet, and for a second Brian has the incongruous thought that he now understands why she's taken to wearing all those ridiculous shoes. "We're done here, Brian."

"I'm sure I'll be seeing you again. A pleasure seeing you, Detective Superintendent. Nice to have met you, Brian."

"Thank you for your time," Brian says stiffly.

"Oh, I have nothing but time. For now."

2.

Gerry splashes cold water on his clammy skin and then presses his fingertips to his eyes until white stars burst behind the closed lids. When he looks at his reflection in the mirror affixed to the tile wall above the plain white sink he finds he looks the same as he did a few hours ago, which is odd because he feels a thousand years older. He is sweating and shaking, and his throat burns sour because he has just upchucked his breakfast as well as a good portion of last night's dinner. When he closes his eyes he sees brutal purple fingerprints marring the milky perfect skin of a soft inner thigh. His flesh crawls because this image is immediately followed by another, a memory of how last night he had pressed his own eager fingertips in just the same spot, how he'd abraded that smooth skin with the roughness of his cheek.

His stomach clenches again but there's nothing left to come up. Water cascades into the porcelain basin and sluices down the drain.

"Gerry – all right, mate?"

He wrenches the tap closed before turning to face Jack. "No," he admits.

Jack nods. "Me either."

At least Gerry had managed to wait until the doors had safely closed behind Brian and Sandra before he bolted for the toilet, but that does little to make him feel less like a useless, cowardly old git. He is literally sick with rage. If he could get near the man, Gerry would rip him limb from limb – which is probably a good part of the reason why Sandra has taken Brian with her to question the man of the hour. Brian is no less devoted to Sandra than her other two comrades at arms, but he's more protected than protector.

"Shit," Gerry rages suddenly, kicking the rubbish bin by the door. "Shit, Jack!"

Jack watches his friend with miserable empathy and doesn't bother pointing out that beating the hell out of an inanimate object won't change anything.

"She's got no business goin' to see him."

"She thinks she does, and maybe she's right."

"And taking Brian -!" Gerry tugs at his hair as if he'd like to pull it out by the roots.

"Arrington can't harm her. He's in prison."

"He already hurt her," Gerry spits. "He hurt _Sandra_." Their Sandra – strong, courageous, steely Sandra, the centre of their strange little UCOS universe. No one hurts Sandra.

His Sandra. The one who pressed herself against him last night with such frenzied urgency, the one whose curves he has already memorized, the one who tasted of coffee and sugar when she kissed him goodbye inside her flat this morning.

Jack and Gerry return to the office in grim silence. All Gerry can see is the marker board with its cargo of horrible, lurid images. "I'm taking those down," he says immediately, but Jack's hand on his sleeve stops him in the act.

"No," the older man says. "She had the courage to put the photos up there. The least we can do is have the courage to look at them."

Gerry swallows hard. He doesn't need to look, because he couldn't forget those photographs if his life depended upon it. He knows Jack is right, though.

3.

"Well?" Jack asks as soon as Brian and Sandra walk through the door.

She shrugs as she shucks off her jacket. "Went how I expected. We weren't doing anything other than giving him practice at perfecting his story."

Jack offers his own shrug. "He's already had sixteen years."

"Brian can fill you in," Sandra says, readjusting her huge black handbag. "I have to see Strickland."

Gerry doesn't speak until she has seized a file and left the three men to themselves. Then he props his elbows on the table. "How was she?" he asks hollowly.

Brian rubs thoughtfully at his chin. "All right, I think. Quiet, but all right."

When they'd returned to her car, Sandra had sat very still for a moment, and then had bowed her head to rest against the steering wheel. When Brian said her name, she'd murmured, "Just a minute." He had waited on pins and needles as thirty or forty seconds ticked by, and then Sandra sat up straight and turned the key in the ignition. "Right," she'd said, "let's go."

He is reliving that moment, a far-away expression in his eyes, when Gerry asks, "What about Arrington? What's he like?"

Brian lifts his shoulders. "Well-spoken, erudite –"

"Gonna start a fan club, are you?" Gerry interrupts snidely.

"I didn't _like_ him, if that's what you mean," Brian returns, his own temper rising. "But being a class-A creep with a superiority complex that makes him sound like a bad James Bond villain doesn't necessarily make him a rapist and murderer."

"This isn't helping," Jack interjects. "Tell us what happened, Brian."

Brian does, and when he has finished Jack wearily presses his fingertips to his forehead. "I feared as much."

"About Tennison, you mean? She was a good copper – one of the best," Gerry volunteers fiercely.

"I know that." Jack's tone is even testier than the norm. "I've known her for the better part of forty years, and I have no doubt the investigation was conducted completely by the book. That doesn't change the fact that Ray Arrington and his solicitor plan to use what happened subsequently to Arrington's advantage."

"Even on her last job, you know – She got a conviction," Gerry points out more quietly. "Not one of those convictions has ever been overturned. None of the cases have ever even been reinvestigated. She was a great detective. Arrington doesn't have a leg to stand on if that's all he's got."

"Unfortunately, it's not," Jack rejoins. "Not with Melanie Tyler out of the way and a murderer on the loose. All the chips are certainly falling in his favour."

"Maybe he's innocent."

Gerry wheels on Brian. "Whose side are you on, anyway?" he demands hotly.

"I'm not taking sides," Brian responds edgily. "It's not a team sport, Gerry, it's an investigation."

"Either you believe Sandra or you don't," Gerry retorts stubbornly, his hands on his hips, as he looks down at his colleague. Brian stiffens.

"Of course he believes Sandra," Jack snaps. "We all do. But she stood right here and told us she never saw her attacker, never heard his voice. There's no proof it was Arrington."

"I don't believe this!" Gerry exclaims, outraged.

"Why don't you go up to the cafeteria and get yourself a cup of tea?"

Gerry snorts. "_You_ go get a sodding tea, Jack!"

"Gerry, mate, come on." Gerry flinches away when Jack rises and touches his shoulder, but the former Detective Chief Super continues. "The last thing Sandra needs when she comes back in here is to find the three of us at each other's throats."

The arrow hits is mark, the appeal on Sandra's behalf doing him in. In a fog, Gerry drifts out of the office and slaps the lift call button, knowing all the tea in China wouldn't make him feel less eager to pound the life out of Ray Arrington.

_A/N: Many thanks to everyone who's still reading. I know the female-detective-being-victimized trope has been done to death, which accounts for much of my desire to do it again – a little differently, I hope. Your feedback makes my little heart palpitate pleasantly and fills me with joy, etc._


	12. Mentors

**Mentors**

1.

Blue eyes meet hazel across the snowy expanse of linen covering a table by the window in a quiet Thames-side café. Neither gaze wavers as Sandra sips her sancerre before saying, "So you didn't know."

The hazel eyes narrow slightly against the sun's rays. "No, I didn't _know_, Sandra."

Perhaps incongruously, Sandra relaxes slightly at the stress the other woman places on that word, the lines of tension at the corners of her mouth smoothing. "But you suspected."

This luncheon is part professional courtesy, part avoidance tactic – Sandra almost laughs at herself as she wonders how many people have ever considered Jane Tennison the lesser of two evils, but her former governor is easier to face just now than the boys would be – and part down to Sandra's simple desire to pick the brain of the woman who had done so much to mold her.

Tennison dredges a bite of fresh bread through the dish of olive oil and pops it into her mouth before replying. "I wondered."

Sandra tilts her head, considering. "But you never tried to find out. I can't imagine it was because you wanted to spare my feelings." She knows the second of her mentors, the one who succeeded to Jack Halford's vacated throne, better than that. "So what, then?"

"We had him, Sandra. By that point we had Arrington, and you were headed back to the murder squad."

Sandra's smile is cynical. "So it was all in the timing?"

"I didn't say that. Are you going to eat your lunch, or drink it? I don't recommend getting pissed in the middle of the day."

"I'm not pissed," Sandra objects hotly.

"Of course not. I never was either."

Sandra grits her teeth and picks up her fork. This is almost as bad as sharing a meal with her mother. "Explain it to me, Jane," she says, stabbing at her fresh pasta with pesto. "When have you ever been one to avoid confrontation?"

"Sandra, you're a good cop. You know that. You always did, although your knowing it made you bloody difficult at times." Tennison nibbles at her penne all'arrabbiata. "As a good cop, if you'd had a shred of evidence against Arrington, anything at all that the CPS could've used against him, would you have let anything get in the way of that?"

Sandra blinks as understanding dawns. "No," she admits, sitting back suddenly, touched by her former boss's faith in her.

"No," the older woman agrees as if this was a foregone conclusion.

Sandra's answering frown is quick. "You didn't even ask, though. What if I'd just been too frightened to come forward?"

Tennison's lips quirk in what Sandra recognizes as the barest hint of a smile. "Were you?"

"No."

"Well, then. And I couldn't ask." When Sandra's frown deepens, Tennison's eyebrows climb. "All right, Detective Superintendent Pullman, think," she instructs in the no-nonsense tone of command Sandra remembers so well. "You're the gov now. An officer under your supervision tells you that she or he has been the victim of a crime likely tied in with a major investigation, and he or she hasn't reported that crime. What is it your duty to do?"

"Report it, of course, remove the officer from the investigation, and most likely undertake disciplinary measures." Sandra looks down at her food and back up at Tennison. "Jane, you spent half your life back then encouraging victims of sex crimes to report them."

"Absolutely." The hazel eyes glance toward Sandra's wine before Tennison picks up her own sparkling water with resignation. "But you were the only victim – I detest that word, you know – who was on the verge of being promoted to DCI. I do believe in female empowerment. After all, I came to the Met in 1968. Even by '95 I hadn't seen many women advance the way I knew you were going to. I suppose I didn't want to cock that up for you."

Sandra sighs. Jane's reasoning is virtually identical to what her own had been at the time. Even in the oh-so-enlightened 1990s, who would've wanted Sandra in charge of the Met's annual holiday do, let alone a bunch of murder cases, after learning that she was a "victim"? That Tennison seems to believe Sandra's perception of the situation was accurate does little to lift the detective superintendent's sagging spirits. "Do you really think that with your recommendation and Jack Halford's –"

Tennison waves the question off before Sandra can finish asking it. "Look, '96 wasn't '68, but still, the Met was a different world then. A man's world. Now – well, I'd like to think it's changed."

Sandra sighs again. "I would too," she murmurs, thinking automatically of Emily and Caitlin, especially Caitlin. What burdens will that young woman have to bear during the course of her career, and how many will be due to her gender or her last name rather than simply the fact that life is life and the Met isn't the easiest place to spend it?

Resolutely Sandra focuses on her food. This is an excellent restaurant, astonishingly reasonably priced, and one she discovered a few months ago thanks to Gerry.

Shit, Gerry. Her fingers clench around her napkin.

As they walk to their cars Sandra offers, "You know, you're welcome to come consult with us on this one. I value your input."

Tennison immediately shakes her head, her silver hair dancing around her ears. "No. Arrington's brief is already trying to use me as a weapon in their arsenal. The last thing you need is to have me associated with this investigation." She lightly touches Sandra's hand. "Besides, I don't have anything to contribute. We got the right man the first time round. Ray Arrington isn't going anywhere, Sandra. You'll see to that; you and the boys."

Sandra hasn't realised how much she needed to hear those words until they hang between the two women. She knows Brian, Jack, and Gerry aren't so certain, but she has to believe Arrington is exactly who and what she's thought him for sixteen years. "Thanks, Jane," she says softly as she opens the driver's side door.

Jane continues a few feet along the pavement before looking back. "By the way, Sandra, satisfy an old woman's curiosity. Those rumours I've been hearing for years about you and Gerry Standing -?"

The sound of Sandra's genuine laugh rings in her own ears, surprising her. "You know, Jane, I think I remember hearing those same rumours about you and Gerry twenty, twenty-five years ago." It's not exactly an answer, but it's all Tennison's going to get. Sandra grins. "I'll be in touch," she says, and slides behind the steering wheel.

2.

The office is very quiet when Sandra returns. She peers around before her gaze comes to rest on Jack, who is quietly hunting and pecking at his keyboard. "Where are the others?"

"Off out," he responds vaguely. "You were gone a long while."

"I had a lunch date after my appointment with Strickland." She settles into one of the office's stray chairs and turns it to face Jack. He recognizes the signal that she's ready to talk and rests his elbows on his desk.

"How are you?" he asks carefully, and she offers him that familiar one-sided quirk of the lips.

"I'm all right, all things considered."

"Better than we are, possibly."

It sounds an odd thing to say in the circumstances, but Sandra understands immediately and feels a rush of gratitude. "I've had a lot longer to get used to the idea."

"Gerry was pretty torn up." Jack is too, but it's not his way to show it. It's his way instead to sit in the office and talk quietly to the woman who was once his golden-haired protégée.

"I owe you all an apology. Another one."

"Sandra, I was hardly angling for –"

She holds up her hand. "But I do. I should've explained to you right away."

"You needed a bit of time. That's perfectly understandable."

She doesn't respond right away, just picks at a cuticle. Jack studies her for a long moment before returning to his typing. When he does she is finally able to admit, "I'm so ashamed, Jack."

Jack's fingers collapse on the keys and the computer beeps in protest until he yanks his hands away. He is gobsmacked. He has heard bull-headed, brash Sandra counsel women in this position. She does it with a tact and sincerity that he has always admired, a finesse he has never attained in the circumstance no matter how genuine his sentiments. It takes him a few seconds to make sense of what she's saying to him.

"Sandra," he begins almost severely, "what happened was not your fault. You have no reason to feel –"

"No, you don't understand." There had been some of that then, of course. Well, a lot of that. That voice insisting that she was a trained police officer, that she should have known better than anyone – but she learned to silence that voice long ago. No one asks to be raped. It's that simple, and that complicated. It was her training, her position, that had made Arrington single her out in the first place. "I'm ashamed of _myself_. That I didn't report it. That was the most selfish, cowardly thing I think I've ever done, Jack."

All right, now _that_ sounds like his Sandra. Jack leans back slightly, relieved.

"I was up for promotion – well, you know."

"You never let on."

She shakes her head. "I couldn't. I couldn't let that define me, not after I'd worked so hard for so long." Her throat bobs as she swallows hard. "It was selfish, though. Sometimes I think that's why this is happening." Her lips quirk again, telling Jack she knows how that sounds. "Not that it's all about me. Not even I'm that much of an egomaniac. But maybe I could have done something then that would've prevented what's happening now."

"Sandra, did you tell us the truth earlier? All of the truth?" Surprised, she nods. "Then you couldn't have prevented it." He stands and drops a hand onto her warm, solid shoulder. "Come on, Brian and Gerry won't be back before it's time to close up shop. I'll buy you a drink, and then we'll go for dinner."

"Indian?" she asks hopefully.

He grins. "What else is there?"

Sandra smiles too, but as they walk out into the cool of the evening together she can't shake the haunting fear that somehow she should've done more, should've tried harder, should've known better.

3.

Gerry should've known better.

His brain is still reeling and nothing is clear other than this one thought that he won't let himself examine too closely. He should've known better than to believe Sandra would just fall into his arms and into his bed so simply and straightforwardly after all this time. She's Sandra Pullman, and he's – Gerry.

As he gets out of the Stag in front of his house he curses himself roughly for allowing that thought, a truly selfish one, to take root, and mentally he rips it away the same way you'd uproot a weed.

"Earth to Gerry."

The laughing voice startles him and he feels like a pillock for only now noticing Emily sitting on the front step. Some detective. That pretty much sums up the last week: some bloody detective he is. Maybe he's too old for this grind after all.

"Hey, Dad," Emily continues, laughing as she gets to her feet and watches his approach. "I ran into Jack and Sandra down the pub and they said you'd left early. I hope you don't mind that I dropped by."

Sandra. He holds back a wince at the mention of her name. He would've waited if he'd known for sure that she was coming back. But then, maybe it's a good thing he didn't. He has no idea what to say to her.

He drags his attention back to the woman standing before him and sweeps her into a one-armed hug as he unlocks the door. "Of course not, sweetheart. I'm always glad to see you." He gestures her inside. Closing the door behind him, he takes a good look at his oldest daughter. Her eyes sparkle. She looks happy. Really, really happy, in fact.

"I couldn't wait to tell you my good news. Actually it's great news. Now don't be mad that you're not the first to hear. I already told Jack and Sandra, but you would've heard then too if you hadn't skived off, and telling Sandra hardly counts anyway – She already knew, of course."

"What are you on about, then?" Gerry demands, managing a grin. Emily's good cheer is so at odds with his own mood that it jars him, but he's genuinely happy to see her looking so pleased.

"You mean you haven't figured it out? Say hello to Detective Inspector Emily Driscoll," she exclaims proudly, and Gerry immediately seizes her in a bear hug, twirling her off her feet.

"Yeah, that's my girl!" He squeezes her until she gasps for breath. "Well done, Em. I knew it was only a matter of time until those twats upstairs realized what an asset they had on their hands and did the right thing."

She mirrors his grin. "Well, in addition to 'those twats,' I have Sandra to thank. Apparently she wrote me a glowing letter or recommendation. She didn't tell you?"

Gerry's smile dims. "She doesn't tell me everything."

"No, I should imagine not," Emily rejoins with a snort.

"I'd say this calls for a celebratory dinner." He stops suddenly. "Unless you've got something more exciting on than dinner with the old man?"

Her exuberant smile transforms her whole face. "Not at all. What are we waiting for?"

4.

When Gerry and Jack walk into the office together the next morning, Sandra's door stands wide open and her handbag is prominently placed in the center of her desk, but there's no sign of the woman herself. "Where's madam?" Jack asks Brian, who is already hard at work although it's only 8:26.

"In with Strickland."

Gerry raises his eyebrows. "Two days in a row?"

Brian shrugs, waiting to see whether Gerry plans to resume hostilities. "He was waiting for her and pounced the second she walked in the door. Said he needed her in a meeting."

"Hmm," Gerry murmurs with no inflection, and flops down at his desk. "Ah, Jack, did Sandra tell Strickland what she told us yesterday?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

The three of them are all thinking the same thing: how will the governor react if Strickland takes her off the case?

"What're you working on?" Gerry asks Brian abruptly.

"I'm cross-referencing reported unsolved rapes from 1990 onwards with the attacker's M.O. If Sandra's right that the murderer developed his technique over time, we may be able to find him this way."

Gerry winces at the way Brian avoids naming Arrington as the guilty party but says, "Good man. Find anything?"

"No, but I'm only up to March '91. I don't know that the odds are terribly good. A much lower percentage of rapes was reported even in the early nineties."

Gerry scowls, and then brightens. "Oi, Arrington went to uni in Exeter, didn't he?"

Jack clicks his tongue against his teeth and lifts the receiver of his desk phone. A few seconds later he's saying, "Mac, it's Jack Halford at UCOS. Get me someone in charge at Exeter Central."

"Exeter?" Sandra asks, coming through the doorway with her arms laden with file folders and photocopies. The motion of her hips causes several inches' worth to slide precariously, and Gerry jumps up to rescue them. "Thanks," she says, trying to catch his eye, but he ducks his head as he asks, "Tea or coffee?"

"Real coffee, if you don't mind."

"That was a short meeting," Brian comments. "What's all this?"

"Copies of everything pertaining to the current investigation as of 8:00 this morning."

"Woohoo!" The ex-D.I. pauses to pump his fist into the air before darting over to see. "Now we're cookin' with gas."

"How'd you swing that?" This from Jack.

That superior little smirk graces her lips. "I simply pointed out that by separating the two investigations the assistant commissioner was asking us to do our job with one hand tied behind our backs. Well, I might have used slightly more colourful language. Strickland agreed with me."

"I'll bet he did," Gerry mutters from the vicinity of the coffee pot. "What about Modell and his lot?"

Jack snorts in a manner that makes Gerry wonder if Sandra learned it from him or vice-versa. "Modell is so bloody desperate he'd take a hand up from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys at this point."

That makes Sandra laugh out loud. "More like Nancy Drew and the hard-headed boys."

"Oh, Nancy, your hair isn't titian, but you do have the blue roadster," Gerry retorts teasingly, and this time he does meet Sandra's gaze. They share one of the quick, amused grins that are such a hallmark of their relationship, and the spark zings right down to Gerry's loafer-encased toes. Does she feel that too?

"How come you're so up on Nancy Drew, then?" Brian asks, the fluorescent lights glinting off the lenses of his glasses as he peers over the mountain of files.

Gerry rolls his eyes. "What do you think the girls read when they were little, you prat?"

"He probably had a crush on Nancy," Jack suggests, and as Sandra grins again Gerry shoots her a broad wink.

"Nah, Bess was more my type. I prefer curvy blondes," he says with an exaggerated leer at her for everyone's benefit. It all seems so normal that he can almost pretend yesterday never happened as long as he doesn't look at the photographs affixed to the white board.

Gerry's gaze drops to his shoes as s storm of emotions kicks up inside him. Sandra had been attacked. Say it, Gerald, he mentally sneers at himself, disgusted. Raped. Just the thought feels like a hot knife sliding between his ribs. He manages to lift his eyes to the coffee pot and stares sightlessly as the brown liquid drips into the carafe.

"You planning to do some work, or just babysit the coffee pot all day?" Brian jokes, and Gerry reacts like a kicked dog.

"Shut it, why don't you," he snarls. The change in his mood is so marked and sudden that everyone else stares for several seconds, but he remains oblivious.

"I need one of you to come with me to talk to Lorelai," Sandra says, shifting gears. "Somehow I don't think she'll be thrilled to see me."

"We could go instead," Jack offers, gesturing between himself and Gerry, as his desk phone rings.

"No, I need to go."

Jack pounces on the receiver – with any luck it's someone from Exeter – and Sandra glances at Brian with the files before walking over to Gerry and the coffee. "They're happy as a pair of clams," she says. "You come with me. I rang UCL, and she has a lecture at ten."

"She doesn't like me much better than she likes you. I'll help Brian; take Jack." It is such an effort to meet her troubled eyes that Gerry is guilty and miserable by the time he manages to do it. "You're sure this is okay? I could get you a latte or something a bit fancier," he offers penitently.

"No need. You make good coffee." She smiles slightly as she says it. Gerry has made coffee for her four mornings in a row now, but this is the first time it has been in the office.

"Okay, then." He pours the steaming liquid into her silly purple and blue mug. He seems to be looking over her shoulder as he hands it to her, and then turns away as quickly as possible to join Brian. No one is paying attention, so Sandra allows herself a small sigh, little more than a deep breath. She and Gerry need to talk; nothing else will squash her sense of guilt and the niggling insecurity nipping at her, the thought that something this heavy is too much to expect him to handle this early in their – well, relationship.

But now there's work to be done. "Come on, Jack," she says as soon as he's off the phone. "We have a date with a very angry young woman."


	13. Daddy's Girl

**Daddy's Girl**

1.

Lorelai Arrington carries herself with great determination and confidence for one so young, but maturity flits away like a butterfly when her gaze lands on Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman – or "that bitch," as she has taken to referring to her to Colin. Her lip lifts in a sneer of disgust. "What do _you_ want?"

Sandra regards her calmly. "To apologise for my behaviour the other day, first of all, and to talk to you."

"Well, I don't want to talk to you," Lorelai retorts, attempting to brush by the policewoman and out of the lecture hall, but somehow wherever she turns, Pullman is there blocking her way.

"You certainly don't have to like me. I'm not wild about you," Sandra says bluntly. "But if you want to help your father, you're going to have to talk to us."

Lorelai hesitates. "As if you would ever help my father."

"I'll find the truth." Sandra fixes the girl with her penetrating gaze. "That's what you say you want."

"If it is, come talk to us," Jack puts in, and Lorelai's focus darts between the two of them. Jack sees her wavering in the face of inevitability.

"I'm not going back to the police station."

"No," Jack agrees easily, "there's no need for that. Come have a cup of tea."

"I prefer coffee," Lorelai remarks snidely, but she falls into step behind Jack with Sandra bringing up the rear.

"Do you?" Jack responds, benign. "What about that? So does Detective Superintendent Pullman."

2.

"Gerry," Brian begins cautiously, observing his friend out of the corner of his eye as Gerry marks something in bright pink highlighter. "You planning to stay mad at me indefinitely?"

Gerry glances up and back down like a reluctant schoolboy. "I'm not mad at you."

"I want to help Sandra," Brian says earnestly. "Just like you do. I want to make sure that whoever hurt her and these other women is locked up and the key thrown away. That's why we have to consider all the possibilities."

"I know," Gerry replies quietly, meeting Brian's steady look. "Mate, I know. I'm not mad at you."

"Are you mad at Sandra, then?"

The question takes Gerry aback and his eyes widen. "Why should I be?"

Brian shrugs. "For keeping this from us. From you."

"What do you mean, from me? We're a team, aren't we?" Gerry volleys, his pulse picking up. Brian hasn't figured out about him and Sandra, has he? "She kept it from all of us."

"Yeah, but if anyone so much as looks at her wrong, you're the one who snaps and snarls like a pitbull."

That's true: with four daughters and three ex-wives, Gerry is naturally protective of those he cares about. It's not chauvinism, it's just that his life is filled with women. He'd do the same to defend Jack or Brian. But when it comes to Sandra, the instinct is more than just that. Anyone guards what he or she loves most.

If he also wants to scream her head off, that's just tension. He has no right or reason to be upset with Sandra. She's the one who has suffered, not Brian, not Jack, and certainly not him.

And now is definitely not the time to bring those confusing, swirling emotions out into the light and examine them one by one.

Gerry sighs as he picks up another file and forces a wry smile. "I'm mad at the world, Brian."

3.

It doesn't escape Sandra's notice that Lorelai has ordered the most expensive drink on the Starbucks menu, but the £5.50 can't do much damage to UCOS's already-FUBAR'ed budget.

"Tell me about your dad," Sandra begins simply when the girl is settled opposite her, with Jack at the end of the table between them so it doesn't feel so much like an interrogation.

Lorelai's eyes widen in surprise. They would be lovely eyes if Sandra could look into them without being reminded of Ray Arrington, whose eyes are almost exactly the same lustrous brown. "What do you want to know?"

"Tell me about the Ray Arrington _you_ know."

Lorelai hesitates for a few seconds. Sandra sees the spark of eager pleasure, even wonder, in the young woman's eyes, and it goes straight through her. She knows that's how she once looked when she talked about her own father, the dead hero.

Well, living men have feet of clay. So do dead ones, as it turns out.

"Well, he – he's extremely smart. At twenty-six he was made one of the managing directors of the brokerage firm where he worked," Lorelai says proudly. "But you know that. You don't know what he's like. I remember he worked like mad when I was little, but he was never too tired to play with me when he came home. We used to do hide and seek, and he'd let me win. Then he'd toss me up into the air and give me a chocolate biscuit when I 'found' him." She smiles slightly at the memory.

"It must've been very hard when he went inside," Jack murmurs sympathetically.

"I was too young to understand, really. At first my mother told me he'd gone on a trip; then she never mentioned him at all after a while. She couldn't stop me asking about him, though, so later, when I went to school, she told me he'd died." The girl falls silent, her mouth tight.

"She must've thought that would be easier for you," Sandra says quietly. "She even changed your name to avoid the notoriety."

Lorelai nods. "Banks was her name before she married my father. I had mine changed back legally when I turned eighteen."

"And your mum?" Sandra knows, of course, but she wants to hear Lorelai's version.

"She died when I was twelve, so I was brought up in care." She shrugs. "It wasn't so bad, really. And it was after she died, when I was going through her things, that I found out about Dad."

"That must've been quite a surprise."

"It was the best day of my life." At Sandra's raised brows she says, "Obviously I knew it was all a mistake. I mean, I went online and read loads about the investigation and the trial, but I knew he couldn't have done it. And there was no proof; it was all circumstantial. Without Melanie Tyler's testimony –" She breaks off and shrugs again, smiling this time like a child on Christmas morning. "So I lost one parent, but I gained another. I won't lose him again. This time I'm old enough to do something about it."

Half an hour later Sandra buckles herself into the passenger side of Jack's car and tips her head back, her eyes closed. Her hair slips down over the collar of her blazer. "Christ, Jack, that poor girl. That poor, deluded girl."

Her companion remains quiet.

"She wants so badly to believe her father is the man she needs him to be that she's convinced herself it's the truth." Sandra knows all too well what that feels like. As hard as it had been at 45, she can only imagine the misery it must have brought a twelve-year-old. "But what could she do other than convince herself? The alternative is that her dad's a murdering serial rapist."

Jack is quiet for a few moments. The Japanese car glides along smoothly. "You did good back there," he says at last. "Well done, Detective Superintendent."

She smiles tiredly. "Thanks, Jack."

It's only when they are tucked into a slot in the parking garage, Jack unbuckling his seatbelt as Sandra slams her door, that he allows himself to finish his thought.

"Your father would be proud of you, Sandra. Very proud."

4.

The voice is familiar but Sandra can't place it until the caller identifies herself. "Sandra? It's Carole Standing. I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time."

Sandra's eyebrows shoot up. At the rate she's going, her features will soon be stuck in a permanent expression of surprise. "Not at all." She moves her half-eaten sandwich to one side of her desk and instinctively looks into the outer office where Jack and Brian are also eating at their desks. Gerry has taken himself off, presumably in search of more exciting cuisine. "Is anything wrong?"

"Not at all. It's about Emily. The girls and I have decided to throw her a little promotion party tomorrow night. You and Jack and Brian are all invited, of course, but I wanted to pass the invitation along to you myself. Will you be able to make it?"

Sandra smiles slightly. Her social calendar isn't exactly full. "I wouldn't miss it."

"Oh, fantastic. It will mean so much to Em to have you there – her mentor and closest friend."

Sandra ponders that, speechless. Is she Emily's closest friend? If so, the two of them are even more alike than Sandra has realised. They don't form relationships lightly, and they don't let anyone get too close. If you depend too much on any one individual, chances are fate will take him or her away from you. That's life.

The thought brings her up short. _Wow, Pullman. Don't you sound like the bitter old spinster?_ she sneers at herself. Is that really how she sees the world?

"Sandra?"

"I'm sorry, Carole. Wool-gathering."

The other woman gives her the details of the party before saying, "I know it's rather unscrupulous, but I've actually called to ask you a favour as well. First, should I invite Emily's whole team? And is there anyone else I should include? I don't want to cause any hurt feelings."

Sandra gives her a few names, adding, "Gerry and I can pass the word along. And yeah, you'd better invite the whole team." She considers. "I don't think there's anyone too contemptible in serious crime these days. Just be careful if you have an open bar."

Carole laughs. "Oh, I know what coppers are like. I was married to Gerry for fifteen years, don't forget. It will definitely be a cash bar. You'll think I'm awful, but that wasn't actually the favour."

The favour involves no more than a quick phone call. Sandra is just hanging up when Jack pokes his head in. "Do you mind if Brian and I are out the rest of the day on inquiries?"

Again with the eyebrows. Is it possible to strain those muscles? "Inquiries," she repeats. "Where, pray tell?"

"Exeter."

She lifts her shoulders philosophically. "If you don't turn anything up, you'll have to pay for your own petrol, I'm afraid."

"That venti soy caramel extra-everything frappucino with whipped cream set us back, did it? Fair enough."

Sandra is sitting at the round table, elbow deep in papers, when Gerry finally rolls in at a quarter of two. "Leisurely lunch, Gerald," she says without looking up. "I'm sure you'll remember that when you fill in your time sheet."

Gerry bites his lip. "Er, sorry, gov."

"Well, dig in." She gestures at the pile of papers. "Brian got through '93, and I'm mid-way through '95, so we'll finish by home time."

Gerry glances surreptitiously at the clock. Seldom has the prospect of three hours alone with Sandra appealed less. "Where are the lads?"

"Exeter, so you're stuck here. Congratulations."

They work in a near-total silence that's increasingly strained. They need to have an actual conversation, something more meaningful than the exchange of a few lines of office banter. At ten to five Sandra excuses herself to the ladies', largely to work up her courage. It's been a while since she's had to give herself a pep talk like this. What the hell is she so nervous about, anyway? It's not like she's worried that he's not interested. And he's already heard the worst of what she has to say. All they need to do is clear the air.

Of course, it would take a lot less time and effort just to drag him back to her flat and shag his brains out. But that wouldn't be mature, and Sandra is trying hard to be mature, or at least to fake it. She's fifty years old, for crying out loud. (_Forty-nine_.)

She returns to the office, all ready to insist on going out for a drink, and stops short, confronting only empty space. As if of their own volition, her hands find her hip. "Seriously?" she demands of the silence.

Predictably there's no response.

5.

Friday finds Gerry at his desk with a particularly virulent tie and a hangdog expression, ashamed of himself for having beaten a hasty retreat the day before, but still panicky at the idea of having a serious conversation with his – with her.

Fortunately for him, the only conversation she seems interested in at the moment is along the lines of "Get me one too" when Gerry announces he's going for a sandwich. The office is much quieter than usual because they're all desperately busy. Jack is trying to track down anyone even vaguely associated with Arrington during his university days, Brian has flagged a few possible from Exeter's unsolved rape cases, and Gerry and Sandra, who hadn't turned up anything promising the previous afternoon, have divvied the files from the current investigation up between them. It's going to be a long day.

At 3:00 Sandra rubs her fingers over her gritty eyes – gently, so as not to smear her mascara – and says, "You know what really pisses me off about these five recent murders?"

"Other than the gratuitous loss of life?" Gerry asks, sounding like Jack.

Sandra takes the comment in stride. "The M.O. It's exactly the same as Arr – as the 1995 attacker's. _Exactly_."

Gerry frowns. "Well, yeah. We've been over that. That's why we're sittin' here with these and Arrington's brief's tryin' to weasel him outta the nick."

"No, but look – Here." Sandra tilts the page she has been studying so Gerry can see it. "Alison Meynell, victim three in 1995. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5'5", 125 pounds. Software developer. Ellen Higgins, victim three, 2011. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5'7", 130 pounds. Internet security professional." When Gerry looks perplexed she clarifies, "It means she was a hacker. A very good one. A tad similar, aren't they? – And here, Debbie Hancock, our second victim in '95." Sandra gestures violently toward the folder Gerry holds. "Shamiria Lunden could be her sister. This is more than a pattern, Gerry. It's a bloody exact replica."

Gerry stares, dumbfounded. It seems so obvious: both physically and professionally, the victims correspond to the original list, right down to the order in which they were killed. "How the bleedin' hell did no one notice this before?"

Sandra leans back and folds her arms. "They weren't looking," she says grimly. "Not for this. You can't solve a puzzle if you only have half the pieces."

Gerry's frown has deepened. "Two possibilities, right?"

"I think so."

"Number one: same killer. But then what's he been doing for entertainment the past sixteen years?"

"Or number two," Sandra picks up. "Copycat. Someone extremely familiar with all the details of the first five assaults." Her gaze flicks back to the pages she holds. "Extremely familiar."

"What, like someone who worked the case? Hey, maybe it's Hargreaves," he jokes lamely to lighten the mood.

Sandra winces, and Gerry could bite his stupid tongue in half. Shit, he's a complete pillock. "As much as I dislike the man," Sandra says, "I can't see him doing this. Besides, I would have… recognised him."

Gerry swallows hard and stares down at his hands. "Fuck, I don't want this to be a copper."

"Neither do I." She looks at her watch. "I've got to go. See you tonight."

Gerry blinks stupidly. "Tonight?"

"At Emily's party." Sandra's eyes narrow. "I assume you _will_ be there."

Before Gerry can attempt to recover some of his lost dignity by coming up with a decent answer, she sails out of the office.

_Note: Okay, so I know there's not a whole lot going on in this chapter, but I promise more excitement next time. I know it has been over a month since I updated. If anyone is still reading, it would be really great if you'd let me know._


	14. In the Dark

_Hi, everyone. Remember me? This long-overdue chapter is very short, because I have lost the plot. Literally. I write everything longhand, and I currently cannot find the rest of this story (it's almost all written!). Stupid lost notebook. So the best I can do right now is to post this, which at least leaves our daring duo in a slightly better position than the one in which I last left them._

**Chapter 14: In the Dark**

Emily's reaction to the surprise party proved that she was a Standing at heart, no matter what her DNA might say. "Oh, my God," she'd gasped, looking around the large private room of the upscale restaurant. "And I've showed up in jeans." She had grabbed the arm of the taller woman beside her, who was not in jeans. "Oi, you could've warned me!"

Sandra had only laughed. It was nice to have an excuse to get dressed up once in a while, as long as she didn't have to do it too regularly, and that was exactly what she'd done. Gerry had been eyeing her all night. Good, let him. Let him take a good, long look at what he was missing by avoiding her. The little strapless black dress was like the one that every woman has in her closet, or should. It was very black and very little – not scandalous, by any means, but it didn't leave much to the imagination, and Sandra knew perfectly well that she made 50 – _49_ – look good. She took Brian's dazed "Wow, Sandra" as lovely if superfluous confirmation. Esther had flashed her a thumbs-up sign.

By God, she and Gerry were going to have that conversation tonight. If not, there was always Plan B. Sandra was prepared for that too.

The result of her favor to Carole catches Sandra's eye and flutters her fingers. "Thank you!" Caitlin mouths with exaggerated drama. Sandra had secured her tonight and two whole days away from police training college on what the army would've termed a "weekend pass."

In response, Sandra lifts her nearly-empty glass of wine and flashes a huge grin. Carole suddenly appears at her elbow. "I hear you're good with wine," the pretty brunette says rather anxiously. "Now you really will think I'm a cow, but would you mind popping into the wine cellar and gathering a few bottles? We're running low, and I don't see the sommelier anywhere."

Sandra, who is several glasses in by this point, smirks. "He's probably on a fag break." She pats Carole's hand. "Not a problem. Red or white?"

Carole blinks. "Oh, both. Definitely both."

"Mmmkay, I'll try not to pick anything that will set you back more than a month's salary," Sandra promises cheerfully, and walks away in her high heels. She loves high heels. She loves the clacking sound the heels make, announcing her presence, and the extra strut they add to her walk.

The wine cellar is, as the name implies, downstairs. The door is cracked, but it's dark inside. "Hullo?" she calls cautiously. Silence is her only reply, so she turns to the task at hand. This is going to be fun. A little illumination would help, but still. The faint glow from the stairs will do.

Her arms are nearly full when she hears footsteps. "Hullo?" she calls again, not wanting the sommelier to think she's nicking his wares.

A figure darkens the doorway and then takes a few steps forward. "Sandra?"

"Gerry? What are you doing down here?"

"Jack said you –"

The door, apparently caught in a draught, slams. "Shit," Gerry swears, blinking rapidly in the pitch blackness. "I'll get it."

She hears him fumbling, but after a moment nothing has happened. "Well?" she demands, readjusting her cargo.

"Uh… you're not gonna like this."

She knows her eyes widen. If this were an old cartoon, you'd see only the whites. "Oh, no. Don't say it."

"Fine," Gerry sighs. "I won't."

Putting the wine down as gently as possible, she feels her way past him in the dark and yanks on the door handle. Then she yanks again. "Shit," she says flatly.

Gerry jostles her as he pounds on the door. "Oi!" he shouts. "Oi, the door's locked!"

While he pounds and shouts, Sandra steps back. "They'll miss us eventually. Or at least they'll miss the wine."

"What are you talking about? There's a room full of wine up there. Barrels of it. Oh, this is just perfect."

Sandra is quiet for several minutes, long enough to make Gerry query, "Sandra?" It isn't like her to be quiet.

"Maybe it's not so bad. A blessing in disguise, and all that."

"What do you mean?"

"It will be awfully hard for you to avoid me in here."

"I haven't been avoiding you."

Silence.

"Shit," Gerry says finally, quietly.

"You know, I came here tonight determined to talk to you."

"What about?"

"Jesus, Gerry, what do you think? The fucking stock market."

At first he was relieved not to be able to see her in the darkness. The way she looks in that dress is damn near killing him. Now, though, he's not so sure. It's as if his other senses have kicked into hyper-alert. The low pitch of her voice arcs through him like an electric current.

"I'm sorry, Sandra."

"Shut up." She finds him in the dark, and when her hand lands on his arm he goies rigid. "Tell me why you're avoiding me." When he remains silent she snaps, "What, you found out I'm damaged goods and now you don't want me any more?"

Floored, he gropes blindly until he finds her shoulders. He wants to shake her. "Jesus Christ, Sandra! There's no fucking way you really believe that, is there?"

"No," she responds quietly. "It was the most outrageous thing I could think of. At least you're talking to me now."

He chuckles, although he feels as if his nerves have been scraped over a cheese grater. "C'mere."

She doesn't resist when he tugs her to his chest, even though they both know it's too soon. "We're talking," she says.

"We are," he agrees.

They are quiet, holding one another. The same height, they align easily, comfortably.

"Sandra," he says against her hair. "Sandra, Sandra, Sandra. I'm so sorry for what happened to you."

"I know."

"I don't think I can talk about it right now, unless you need to. I'll go to the prison and kill him if I do."

"No," she murmurs. "We don't need to talk about it. It was a long time ago. I won't forget it, but I've dealt with it."

"It's not – You can tell me about it, if…" He trails off helplessly.

"I know," she says again, and presses a kiss to his jaw. "I know."

"I didn't know what to say, Sandra. I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything."

He cradles the back of her head, ruffling her hair. "I want to. I want to fix it."

"Shh," she soothes. "Nothing's broken.

"This isn't the way it goes. I'm meant to comfort you."

"I'm comforted by sixteen years of water under the bridge. You've only had a couple of days to deal with it."

"That doesn't matter."

"Did I say shut up or not? Shut up, Gerry. Look, I know, okay?"

"What do you know?"

"That you're mad at me."

He clutches her, and she lets him. "No," he says. "No, love, no."

"Shut _up_. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have let you find out like that, with Jack and Brian. I just –"

He cuts her off by kissing her, and he feels the way she gives herself up to him. This, he thinks, is enough. "Whatever you need, Sandra. Whatever you want."

She seems to consider. "Do you have a corkscrew?"


End file.
